■M-* 



LIBRARY OF.CONGREb. 




Shelf. 



1 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



I . ..-r^ ;. ■■; 



MY PORTFOLIO 



A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS 



BY 



AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. 

LATE PKOFESSOR IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, AUTHOR 

OP " MEN AND BOOKS " AND " THE THEORY 

OF PREACHING" 




NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1882 



*$» 



Copyright by 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 

1882. 



JFranMin J9re#$ : 

RAND, AVERY 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 027346 



PREFACE. 



The papers here republished are a selection of arti- 
cles printed during the last few years in the columns 
of u The Congregationalist," " The Independent,' ' 
"The Christian Union," and " The Sunday School 
Times." The reception which has been given to them 
encourages me to believe that their usefulness may be 
extended in their present form. 

A minister who is the son of a minister finds no 
other element in his professional training so valuable 
as the influence, obvious or latent, of his father. The 
mental life-stream flows from father to son with a 
more electric continuity than is often realized in any 
other profession. The consequent sense of filial obli- 
gation grows more profound with increasing years. It 
is with this consciousness of the very large place held 
in my own professional life by the colloquial instruc- 
tions of my father, that I have given to his remarkable 
ministry the first portion of this volume. 

AUSTIN PHELPS. 

Andover Theological Seminary. 
September, 1882. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. A Pastor of the Last Generation. I. . 1 

II. A Pastor of the Last Generation. II. 14 

III. A Pastor of the Last Generation. III. 26 

IV. The Eights of Believers in Ancient 

Creeds. 1 38 

Y. The Eights of Believers in Ancient 

Creeds. II 47 

VI. The Biblical Doctrine of Eetribution . 58 
VII. The Puritan Theory of Amusements . 66 
VIII. The Christian Theory of Amusements . 74 
IX. Is Card-Playing a Christian Amuse- 
ment? 80 

X. The Question of Sunday Cars ... 88 
XI. Woman-Suffrage as judged by the 

Working of Negro-Suffrage ... 94 
XII. Eeform in the Political Status of 

Women 105 

XIII. The Length of Sermons . . . .117 

XIV. The Calvinistic Theory of Preaching, 123 
XV. The Theology of "The Marble Faun," 130 

XVI. The Debt of the Nation to New Eng- 
land 140 

XVII. Ought the Pulpit to ignore Spiritual- 
ism? 150 

v 



VI 



Contents. 



CHAPTER PAGE 
XVIII. HOW SHALL THE PULPIT TREAT SPIRITU- 
ALISM ? 161 

XIX. Foreign and Home Missions as seen by 

Candidates for the Ministry . . 172 
XX. Foreign Missions, their Eange of Ap- 
peal for Missionaries limited . . 181 
xxi. congregationalists and presbyterians: 

a Plea for Union 191 

xxii. congregationalists and presbyterians! 

Methods of Union 199 

XXIII. The Preaching of Albert Barnes . . 205 

XXIV. A Vacation with Dr. Bushnell . . 219 
XXV. Prayer viewed in the Light of the 

Christian Consciousness . . . . 230 

XXVI. Intercessory Prayer 239 

XXVII. Hints Auxiliary to Faith in Prayer . 244 

XXVIII. The Vision of Christ 250 

XXIX. The Cross in the Door .... 254 
XXX. The Premature Closing of a Life's 

Work 258 

XXXI. What do we know of the Heavenly 

Life? 271 



MT POBTFOUO. 



My Portfolio. 



A PASTOR OP THE LAST GENERATION. 

PART I. 

When a man of God, who has been blessed 
in his work above the average of ministers, out- 
lives his own generation, and the " cloud" of 
extreme old age has "received him out of our 
sight," may not filial reverence be pardoned in its 
desire to tell the living, and specially the youthful, 
ministry what manner of man he was ? Thus 
would I pay my last earthly tribute to my vener- 
able father, by speaking of him to my younger 
brethren and my late pupils. 

The Rev. Eliakim Phelps, D.D., died on the 
twenty-ninth day of December, 1880, at the resi- 
dence of one of his sons in Weehawken, N.J., at 
the age of ninety years and nine months. He 
was of English Puritan descent through both 
father and mother. His was the seventh genera- 
tion of the family name in this country. The 



2 My Portfolio. 

first, the Hon. William Phelps, emigrated only 
ten years after the sailing of " The Mayflower." 
That Hon. William the family hold in great rev- 
erence. He was one of the leaders of the colony 
which marched from Dorchester through the un- 
broken wilderness to found the town of Windsor 
in Connecticut, in 1635. There he became a man 
of mark, as Stiles's " History " says, in both Church 
and State. He was one of the eight, who, by 
authority of the Massachusetts Legislature, con- 
stituted the first legislative and judicial body of 
the infant settlements of Connecticut. 

The religious and political heritage of the fam- 
ily may be inferred from the fact, that several of 
them received grants of land from Oliver Crom- 
well, and that John, a younger brother of the 
pioneer William, was secretary to the Protector 
in 1654. At the Restoration he fled to Connecti- 
cut, where he lived in hiding, as the family legend 
reads, with the regicides Whalley and Goffe. 
Afterwards he went to Switzerland, and died at 
Vevay. Such were the ancestral memories which 
pervaded the home of my father's childhood. They 
gave him an almost intolerant antipathy to prelacy 
in all forms. Grim ancestors from the bar of Lord 
Jeffreys looked out through all his opinions of 
church government. He took great satisfaction 
in the fact that the blood of men persecuted by 
Laud and Strafford ran in his veins. 

His father was a plain farmer in Hampshire 
County, Massachusetts; but he was one of the 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 3 

natural chiefs so often found in New-England 
towns, whose force of character lifts them into 
leadership in all local affairs. He was the per- 
petual selectman, moderator, counselor, referee, 
representative in the " Great and General Court," 
as the Legislature of Massachusetts was then re- 
spectfully entitled in the nomenclature of the 
hills. He represented Belchertown in that body 
for sixteen successive years. He bore striking 
resemblance in person and character to the Hon. 
Jeremiah Mason, late of the Boston bar. 

One of the earliest and latest impressions I 
received of my father was that of his pardonable, 
though sometimes amusing, pride of family. Par- 
donable, because their knightly escutcheon, so 
dear to English blood ; and their descent in the 
shadowy past from the Italian "Welfs," — the 
German "Guelphs" of historic fame, — and their 
connection thus with the regnant house of Hano- 
ver on the throne of Great Britain ; and the peril- 
ous service of one of them in high office near the 
person of Cromwell; and their kindred, in the 
person of my father's grandmother, with Lady Jane 
Grey, whose name she bore, — were all merged 
and submerged, in his thoughts, in the one more 
than royal distinction, that, as far back as the 
family name could be traced in historic record, 
every one in his own branch of it had been either a 
minister or other dignitary of the Church of Christ. 
It was a life-long cause of gratulation to him 
that he inherited the blood of eight generations 



4 My Portfolio. 

of Christian ministers and deacons. This fact I 
have known ever since I can remember. The gew- 
gaws of ancestral fame before mentioned I did not 
hear of till I was near manhood ; and some of them 
I then learned not from him, but from the comments 
of an English visitor on our family door-plate. 

I have never known a man — I have known a 
few women — who had a more profound reverence 
than he had for the office and work of a Christian 
pastor. To him they were above all other digni- 
ties on earth. He honestly believed that the pas- 
toral office had no superior. He refused to advise 
my exchange of a pastoral pulpit for a professor- 
ship at Andover. When he called on Gen. Jack- 
son, then President of the United States, his 
associates were amused at the stately repose with 
which he greeted the nation's head. To be a 
preacher of the gospel was a loftier honor than to 
be a prince of the blood-royal. So pervasive was 
this conviction in the atmosphere of his household, 
that I distinctly remember my resolve, before I 
was four years old, that I would become a minis- 
ter ; not so much because the ministry was my 
father's guild, as because he had taught me noth- 
ing above that to which ambition could aspire. 
Was not ours the house of Aaron, and ours the 
tribe of Levi? 

In a New-England inland town three-quarters 
of a century ago, it was a decree fore-ordained, 
that such a youth as he was should find or make 
his way to the college and the pulpit. It was one 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 5 

of the prerogatives of a Congregational pastor 
to foresee the predestined clergymen among the 
youth of his charge. It was in the religious faith 
of a New-England family that such a predestina- 
tion must be executed, at whatever cost to them. 
My father's pastor set the prophetic eye on him 
at the " spelling-bees," which were the climax of 
the examinations at the village schoolhouse. My 
father commonly led off one of the contending 
battalions, under the pastor's imperial review. 
Samuel to the sons of Kish was hardly more 
authoritative. 

Thus called, " as if a man had inquired at the 
oracle of God," he saw only a question of time. 
He went through the hardships of poverty, which 
have made so many of our New-England clergy 
self-reliant and original theologians. Being one 
of nine children compelled to hatchel a living 
from a Hampshire County hill-farm of about two 
hundred acres, rocks and whortleberries included, 
he could receive but little aid from his father. He 
worked at the rocks and the whortleberries till he 
was nineteen years of age. He has often pointed 
out to me the bowlders which he blasted to make 
a rude mountain-road from the homestead to the 
turnpike. That road was like the road to Jeru- 
salem. It was the only avenue from the farm to 
the two chief essentials of existence to a Yankee 
family, — the schoolhouse and the church. 

In summers he reaped the rye-field with a hand- 
sickle; wheat being a rare luxury, reserved for 



6 My Portfolio. 

the honor of hospitality, or as the honest mother, 
not adroit of speech, used to express it, "for /ear 
somebody should come." He either attended or 
"kept" the district school three months in the 
winters. He held the plow with a Latin gram- 
mar tucked under his waistband, and conjugated 
" amo " while the oxen rested at the end of the 
furrow. One of the first tokens which his father 
detected of the son's destiny was the discovery 
that "Eliakim," with the same yoke of oxen, 
could not plow as large a patch of ground in a 
day as his younger brother. He did not overwork 
the oxen. Twice a week he walked three miles 
and a half, after his day's work was done, to recite 
to his pastor in the evening, trudging back again 
in the moonlight or the storm, as it might happen. 
In his twentieth winter, after chopping wood 
with his brothers from dawn to twilight, he read 
a second-hand Virgil at night, lying flat on the 
kitchen-floor, before the huge old-fashioned fire- 
place, while his brothers and sisters were hatchel- 
ing flax around him. They were too thrifty to 
burn other lights than that of the pine-knots which 
they had providently saved from the wood-pile of 
the summer before. He thus created a perpetual 
weeping of one eye, which discouraged scholarly 
tastes in him through life, and became the theme 
of friendly banter, when, thirty years later, he 
used to address the General Assembly of the 
Presbyterian Church. His introductory gesture 
was usually a comical slap at his weeping eye. 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 7 

He went to college in a homespun suit from the 
fleece of the sheep he had washed and sheared; 
he wore stout brogans made by an itinerant cob- 
bler from the hide of the cow he had milked and 
fatted ; having made with his own hands, of boards 
from the tree he had felled, the paper-lined trunk 
which contained his scanty wardrobe and more 
scanty library. 

In such privations, not thought of as self-deni- 
als, the foundations of the man were laid. Words- 
worth's "plain living and high thinking" are 
seldom more grandly illustrated than in the un- 
conscious heroism of many of our New-England 
youth on their way from the plow to the pulpit. 
Dr. Sprague's " Annals of the American Pulpit " 
indicate that a large majority of the successful 
ministers of the last generation went through the 
discipline of the straitened purse and the frugal 
home. We who have never known any other 
than homes of ease and culture know very little 
of the cost of our inheritance. They were great 
men, who amidst the adjuncts of manual labor 
only, and the talk- about beeves and swine, with 
scarcely an intellectual stimulus in their homes, 
except the report from the town-meeting, and the 
daily prayer, and the word of God, began the line 
of culture in their families. That is a costly heri- 
tage which they have transmitted in gentle blood 
to their children and their children's children. It 
may take, as wise men tell us, three generations 
to turn out a scholar thoroughbred ; but all honor 



8 My Portfolio. 

to him, who, in obedience to the cravings of an 
aspiring spirit, heads the trio. 

My father entered, well fitted for those times, 
the sophomore class of Brown University in 1811. 
After two years of study he was attracted, by the 
then splendid fame of Dr. Nott, to Union College, 
where he graduated, with an honorary oration, in 
1814. Among his collegiate associates were the 
Rev. Benjamin B. Wisner, D.D., of the Old South 
Church, Boston; the Rev. Francis Wayland, D.D., 
president of Brown University; the Rev. Joel 
Hawes, D.D., of Hartford ; and the late President 
of the United States, Martin Van Buren. 

He was one of a class of sixteen, formed as the 
nucleus of a theological seminary at Schenectady, 
but which was soon transferred, and became the 
well-known seminary at Auburn, N.Y. His chief 
theological training he received from Dr. Nott and 
Dr. Yates of Union College. The theology of Dr. 
Nott was — what it was. To his pupil it seemed 
very slippery : he could not grasp it. That of Dr. 
Yates was the Confession of Dort pure and sim- 
ple. With him the young theologue held stout con- 
troversy in the " Conflict of the Ages." He could 
repeat the Westminster Catechism by heart when 
he was twelve years old. But the theology of his 
manhood, both of heart and head, he fashioned 
for himself in those friendly jousts with Dr. Yates. 
It was New England grappling with Old Holland. 
The young Puritan fought it out as if nobody had 
ever crossed swords in the same fight before. He 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 9 

built his theology as if he were laying the founda- 
tions of the world de novo. In temperament, and 
by necessity of original make, he was a "New- 
School man." If he had been trained to an ada- 
mantine interpretation of the Confession of Dor- 
drecht, before President Edwards was born, he 
would have floundered out of it, in some way, into 
some equivalent of the " New-England theology." 
He was to that " manner born." Yet to his con- 
sciousness every iota of it was a discovery of his 
own. That which Froude says of Latimer was 
true of him, — " He was not an echo, but a voice." 

In this, as in some other things, he strongly 
resembled the late Rev. Dr. Finney of Oberlin. 
The theological elements were so compacted in 
the intellectual make of both of them, that no 
drill of the schools, and no authority of council 
or synod, could ever have made a high Calvinist 
of either. In those conversational encounters with 
Dr. Yates, Dr. Phelps was unconsciously prepar- 
ing for the part he afterwards acted in opposition 
to the disruption of the Presbyterian Church in 
1837-1838. 

He read theology also, for a while, with the Rev. 
Dr. Wittar of Wilbraham, Mass. I am unable to 
find traces of the influence of that estimable pas- 
tor in the subsequent life of his pupil. I suspect 
that the magnet which drew him secretly to Wil- 
braham was, that, in the choir of the village church, 
the young and beautiful one was waiting for his 
coming, who became the helpmeet of his ministry 



10 My Portfolio. 

for nearly thirty years, and whom he gratefully 
recognized as his superior in power with God. Of 
her, not long before his death, when memory, dying 
to other things, grew young again to that golden 
age, he said, " Nine and twenty years we walked 
together, and I never knew her to do a wrong 
thing, or to say an unwise one." 

A son is a less impartial judge of a mother's 
character than of that of a father. Are there any 
mothers who are not Madonnas? But disinterested 
observers of this one have told me that her re- 
markable judgment, her reticence of speech, and 
her pre-eminent religious culture, well deserved 
her husband's tribute. The promise, "He shall 
give his angels charge over thee," was fulfilled to 
him in the presence of one ministering spirit in 
earthly form. He was one of the many successful 
pastors who owe their success largely to prudent 
and godly wives. He was one of the few who 
have grace to see and acknowledge the obligation. 

He was licensed to preach by the Congregational 
Association of ministers of Windham County, 
Connecticut. It was his purpose to seek a settle- 
ment in the then destitute regions of " the West." 
This probably meant Western New York, which 
was then rapidly filling up with families from New 
England, or, at the farthest, Ohio, where explor- 
ing missionaries were then traversing forests by 
the aid of blazed trees. But by one of those 
minute providences which turn the little rill of a 
man's career far back near its trickling springs, 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 11 

he was invited to supply the pulpit of the church 
in West Brookfield, Mass., for two sabbaths, while 
another man, to whom a " call " had been given, 
should deliberate and decide upon his answer. 
The result was, that he became the pastor of that 
ancient church, as colleague with the Rev. Dr. 
Ward, in 1816. 

That church was then composed, to a consid- 
erable extent, of members who had been admitted 
under the "Halfway Covenant." The youthful 
pastor gave unmistakable token of his future by 
making it a condition of his settlement that that 
disastrous usage should be abolished. The change 
could not be achieved by a vote. It encountered 
bitter opposition, and was a long process. But he 
was sustained by the best element in the church, 
at the head of which he reckoned his powerful 
and constant friend, the Hon. Judge Foster, grand- 
father of the Hon. Dwight Foster, late of the 
Supreme Court of Massachusetts. The private 
counsel, as well as the public support, of Judge 
Foster, was of great value to him in that perilous 
beginning of his career. We of this generation 
have little conception of the difficulty in those 
times of making an orthodox faith and an active 
spiritual religion seem intellectually and socially 
respectable. One man of high culture and equal 
piety in a community was a tower of strength to 
a young preacher of the despised faith. 

One word expresses in miniature his character 
as a preacher. He belonged to that class of 



12 My Portfolio. 

preachers, who by temperament, as well as by 
theological conviction and providential opportu- 
nity, are revivalists; not itinerant evangelists, 
but pastoral leaders of spiritual reformations. 
Certain men in the ministry seem created by God 
for that service. The best of them are found in 
the pastoral office. They are nqt only profound 
believers in the reality of such works of divine 
grace, but they possess natural gifts and tastes 
which make them a power in popular awakenings. 
They are prophets in their discernment of the 
conditions in which such awakenings are practi- 
cable. They foresee them in their coming. They 
have electric affinities with the heart of live audi- 
ences. With such gifts is combined a certain 
power of " natural selection " in their choice of 
homiletic materials and methods. I call it " natu- 
ral selection," because it is much more the work- 
ing of the oratorical instinct, moved by the grace 
of God, than of any scholastio teaching, or of 
conscious deliberation. The result is a marvelous 
power of quickening, and of command over great 
assemblies. 

They are not merely direct and pungent preach- 
ers, whose aim is to convert souls. Other men 
are all that who have not their success. Often, 
indeed usually, they are not men of accomplished 
scholarship ; nor are their successes necessarily 
evidence of uncommon spiritual attainments. Men 
not eminent in these respects often possess the 
revival temperament, and its cognate gifts, in such 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 13 

large development as to give character to their 
whole ministry. Wherever they go, they are 
awakening powers in the pulpit. To the uncon- 
verted their voice is as the trump of judgment. 
Dead churches are quickened at their summons. 
Torpid communities groveling in worldliness are 
lifted into an upper atmosphere. 

Religious inquirers find in these men a wonder- 
ful insight into spiritual conditions, and tact in 
meeting spiritual wants. Though not learned 
men, they have " the tongue of the learned." They 
speak the word in season. Common people hear 
them gladly. A certain power to steady in the 
very act of arousing, and so to hold well in hand, 
the emotions of packed audiences, enables them 
to achieve a wise economy of the moral forces, so 
as to promote great results in brief time and with 
the minimum of waste of sensibility. This is the 
look of their work to critical observers. For the 
most part, they are themselves unconscious of 
the profound and complicated art which they 
practice. Like other chosen builders of great 
things, they build better than they know. 



II. 

A PASTOR OF THE LAST GENERATION. 

PART II. 

The providence of God works with its chosen 
instruments. Men of the revival temperament 
described in the preceding pages, God commonly 
calls, by obvious opportunity, to leadership in great 
awakenings. For this cause came they into the 
world. Sometimes, like the elder Edwards, they 
are men of, in one sense, profound learning and 
eminent piety ; but they are not necessarily such. 
Nor are their temperament and their providential 
work very friendly to either the tastes or the 
habits of eminent scholarship. The combination 
of all these elements in one man is very rare. 
When has a second Edwards appeared in our 
American churches ? Indeed, was even his learn- 
ing, in the sense of knowledge of libraries, any 
thing burdensome? The providence of God ap- 
pears often very daring in its choice of imperfect 
instruments to do marvelous things. 

Such preachers as the Rev. Dr. Davies of Vir- 
ginia, the Rev. Gilbert Tennent of New Jersey, 
the Rev. Dr. Nettleton of Connecticut, the Rev. 

14 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 15 

Lyman Beecher in Boston, the Rev. Dr. Taylor of 
New Haven, the Rev. Dr. Finney of Oberlin, the 
Rev. Dr. Blackburn of Missouri, and the Rev. Dr. 
Kirk of Boston, were representatives of this class 
of preachers. In the direct work of converting 
souls, and augmenting the numbers of the church, 
these men had no superiors. Such men do not 
execute as well, nor do they often estimate at its 
true value, the work of educating churches up to 
the more mature experience of a sanctified culture. 
To this class of preachers the subject of this 
sketch belonged. Almost immediately after his 
ordination at West Brookfield, that venerable 
church began to quake as it had never done 
before since the Pequot war. His voice was that 
of one crying in the wilderness. Professors of 
religion under the "Halfway Covenant" were 
shaken out of their dreams. As usual, the 
awakening of men and women of blameless lives 
roused opposition. Some of the honored leaders 
of the church feared such an unwonted ado about 
religion. It was not comfortable. Things were 
not as they used to be. What was that but 
fanaticism ? Evening meetings were objected to. 
Their fathers had not been guilty of evening meet- 
ings. Tallow candles — and the ancient church 
edifice contained no provision for any thing better 
— were not a churchly means of illumination in 
divine things. It was denounced as a disorder, 
if not a sin, to carry public worship into times 
and places which God had not consecrated to the 



16 My Portfolio. 

purpose. Did not the Lord know how much time 
could be wisely given to public praying? The 
danger of nocturnal meetings to the youth of the 
two sexes was dreaded with pious horror. Un- 
usual anxiety was felt for the overworked sexton. 
All things considered, what was the world coming 
to? The headstrong young preacher who was 
turning it upside down was threatened with a 
short pastorate. 

On one occasion his spirit was stirred within 
him at seeing a crowd of the young men surround- 
ing his own door at the hour he had appointed 
for a meeting of religious inquiry. Their hope 
was to intimidate the young women from attend- 
ing it. As he approached, they fell back to the 
right and the left ; and, as he walked up between, 
he cheerily invited them all to enter with him. 
" Whales in the sea God's voice obey." Laughing 
and jesting, the crowd followed him in. The 
dignity and beauty of the young wife awed them. 
Some of them were soon weeping; and before 
the winter was over the majority of them were 
converted. 

His was one of the earliest Sunday schools es- 
tablished in this country. At the time, he knew 
of but one other. He organized his own on the 
very next day after he heard of one. Some of 
the best members of his church thought it a dese- 
cration of the sabbath. They refused to send 
their children. He might have been overcome in 
the controversy, had he not been supported by the 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 17 

wise counsel of Judge Foster. Said the judge to 
the opposers, "If you know your own interests, 
you will not drive this young man from you by 
refusing to let him work in his own way. Every 
captain must be master of his own ship. Give 
him time, and see what comes of it." Time 
showed that the Lord was with the young man. 

On another occasion, a party of rude fellows 
sent to him a beautiful but notorious woman, who 
had been the ruin of some of them, persuading 
her to represent herself as an inquirer, anxious 
for her soul's salvation. They hoped to entangle 
him in some indiscretion. He detected the sham 
the instant she made known her errand. He 
turned, and invited his young wife to remain at 
the interview ; and, after kneeling in prayer, he 
gave to the poor creature an admonition of such 
caustic fidelity, that she went back to the sons of 
Belial, and told them that she had been on a fool's 
errand, and that it would take longer heads than 
theirs to " catch the parson." 

The revival advanced with increasing power, 
till the visible fruits of the " Halfway Covenant " 
were nearly eradicated from the church, and the 
whole town was pervaded by a new spirit. The 
work extended also into surrounding towns. He 
was sent for from far and near to labor in similar 
scenes. He was not partial to " evangelism " in 
the conduct of revivals in the older settlements of 
the country. His theory was, that mutual pastoral 
help was more effective, and less dangerous to the 



18 My Portfolio. 

unity and good order of the churches. On this 
theory he acted. Braintree, Spencer, Somers, 
Warren, Sturbridge, Ware, Worcester, Northamp- 
ton, Boston, and other places, witnessed the suc- 
cess of his preaching, especially in arousing the 
impenitent, and leading them to Christ. Thirty 
years afterwards I found traces of his wrrrk still 
remaining among the older members of the Park- 
street Church, in which he preached six weeks in 
the midst of a revival. Deacon Proctor, a well- 
known officer of that church, if I mistake not, met 
the decisive crisis of his religious life at that time. 

The spirit of progressive enterprise led the 
country minister to organize a temperance society 
at West Brookfield, on the principle of total absti- 
nence, when only one other member, even of the 
Brookfield Association of Ministers, supported 
the movement. He was the first clergyman of 
the county to remove the liquor-bottles from his 
sideboard. He bore calmly the charge that he 
did it from parsimonious motives. An aged cleri- 
cal associate, who had more than once been seen 
to stagger up the pulpit-stairs on a Sunday after- 
noon, begged of his young brother not to be 
wiser than his fathers, nor more temperate than 
his blessed Master. For one, he wanted no better 
example than the Lord Jesus. 

The mind of the young pastor was at that time 
on the alert to discover and to welcome any good 
cause. Foreign missions were a novelty to the 
American churches. Edward Everett satirized 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 19 

them in rhetoric unequaled. They found in my 
father a congenial spirit from the first. It was 
one of the entertainments of my childhood to 
teach the alphabet, when I knew little more mj- 
self, to the heathen youth whom he took into his 
family. The first missionary mechanic sent to the 
Hawaiian Islands was a member of his congrega- 
tion. At the same time he was one of the most 
active friends of Amherst College, and one of the 
clerical donors to its treasury when its existence 
was imperiled. It was once my privilege to 
count the pile of silver-pieces on his table, which 
he had collected, in response to the appeal of 
Professor Stuart, for the library of Andover Semi- 
nary, — so varied and broadcast were the sympa- 
thies of the country parson. 

The initiation which he received to the work of 
the pulpit by a powerful work of divine grace, 
wrought an effect on him which is often witnessed 
in the experience of pastors of the revival tem- 
perament. He fell into a snare. When years 
passed, and the revival was not repeated, he be- 
came restless and dissatisfied. They seemed to 
him years of waste. Theorize as he might about 
it, and his theory was correct enough, yet it 
was not in the nature of things that he should 
find in the slow education of the church the same 
bounding pulse of activity, and the same sense 
of achievement and of conquest, which exhilarated 
him when the tide of the religious awakening ran 
high. This is one of the re-actionary evils of re- 



20 My Portfolio. 

vivals of which pastors need to take wise account. 
He, in his youthful and impatient zeal, did not. 
Like the rest of us, he read providences through 
the lens of temperament and prepossession, and 
at length persuaded himself that God called him 
elsewhere. He resigned his charge, and became 
the principal of the "Ladies' High School" at 
Pittsfield, Mass. 

But scarcely was he inaugurated to his new 
office, when he discovered that he had committed, 
as he always afterwards called it, the great mis- 
take of his life. He had left his heart, and the 
best capabilities of his nature, behind him, in the 
pulpit which he had abandoned. God had called 
him from the sheepfold to preach, not to teach. 
He reproached himself with ascetic severity for 
having allowed himself to be allured or driven 
from the true work of his life. But, at that 
humiliating juncture, his life illustrated signally 
the magnanimity with which God often overrules 
the mistakes of his chosen ones. 

It happened that the pulpit of the First Church 
in Pittsfield was then vacant, by reason of the 
absence of its invalid pastor on a long furlough.' 
My father was invited to be its pastor pro tempore. 
He engaged in the work with the humility of a 
penitent prodigal. The result, under God, was a 
revival of marvelous power, even for that favored 
town, which had but recently enjoyed the ministry 
of the Rev. Dr. Humphrey. In a few months, 
more than three hundred converts were admitted 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 21 

to the churches, the majority of them attributing 
their conversion to my father's labors. He was 
once more in his natural element. Night and day 
he labored for souls, and God gave him his heart's 
desire. 

His longing to return permanently to pastoral 
office was deepened. As soon as his engagement 
with the trustees of the High School would per- 
mit his honorable retirement, he resigned the 
position, though his success in it had been un- 
doubted, and it had begun to be pecuniarily 
profitable. He resumed his original purpose of 
seeking a pulpit in Western New York. In 1830 
he succeeded the Rev. Henry Axtell, D.D., as pas- 
tor of the First Presbyterian Church at Geneva, 
N.Y. On his way there, he preached with success 
in a revival in the city of Rochester. 

At Geneva he remained six years. Again his 
ministry was attended with rich results in the 
conversion of the impenitent. At that period he 
Was one of Dr. Finney's pastoral coadjutors. 
Though not friendly to the employment of evan- 
gelists in churches well provided with the agencies 
of churchly work, yet he recognized cordially 
providential exceptions. Of these he believed Dr. 
Finney to be one. This, it should be remembered, 
was long before Dr. Finney had gained that con- 
fidence of the churches which he enjoyed at Ober- 
lin. My father, though he did not approve all his 
methods of procedure, yet was his stanch friend 
and supporter. His recognition of that remarka- 



22 My Portfolio. 

ble man as one chosen of God to a great work, 
was an instance of rare foresight of coming history. 

More than four hundred persons were added to 
the churches of Geneva who traced their conver- 
sion to my father's ministry. Among them were 
many cases of overwhelming conviction of sin. 
Conversions like those of Edwards and Brainerd 
were frequent. He used to be summoned at 
midnight to souls in despair. Some cases also 
occurred which looked fearfully like instances of 
the unpardonable sin. The narrative of one such 
he published, and it had a circulation of nearly a 
hundred and fifty thousand copies. The culmina- 
tion of his life's usefulness probably occurred in 
that revival. 

I well remember the debates in the parsonage 
between him and those of his clerical brethren 
who distrusted Dr. Finney. He had little to say 
of clerical theories, for or against. He used to 
appeal to the facts known and read of all men. 
There were the dead churches before Dr. Finney's 
advent, and there were the same churches teem- 
ing with life afterwards. What more need be 
said ? For many years he kept himself informed 
as to the permanence of Dr. Finney's work. The 
statistics he collected from the churches of West- 
ern New York confirmed his judgment of those 
revivals, that they were the genuine work of God. 
It was no small part of an education for the min- 
istry to listen to those clerical discussions about 
the great evangelist. One of my father's axioms, 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 23 

I remember, impressed me deeply : " Better do 
some things wrong than do nothing." Few things 
illustrate the adventurous spirit of his life better 
than that proverb. It covers, also, a very large 
portion of the debatable ground between the 
friends of revivals and those good men who are 
more keenly sensible of the perils of them than 
of their benefits. 

Rochester, Lockport, Lyons, Penn Yan, Canan- 
daigua, Ovicl, Buffalo, Auburn, Utica, were among 
the localities in which he preached with marked 
success. In those years he rarely, if ever, preached 
sermons which were not apparently the means of 
immediate and visible usefulness. To my boyish 
judgment he seemed to live in one continuous 
revival. Such was the atmosphere of the parson- 
age. Such was the spirit of all his preaching. 
His days were spent, when not in his study, in 
the work of conversation with men upon the reali- 
ties of eternity. 

I remember once riding with him six miles into 
the country in search of a man, not one of his 
congregation, but who professed to be an infidel, 
and whom my father claimed on the principle 
which he often affirmed as the rule of his pastoral 
labors, — " The man who belongs nowhere belongs 
to me, and I must give account of him." On the 
occasion referred to he spent the whole afternoon 
in argument and friendly admonition to the un- 
believer. I could not judge of his success : I only 
knew that he seemed to have made the man his 



24 My Portfolio. 

friend. One of the wealthiest men in his parish 
was believed to be unapproachable on the subject 
of religion. The pastor, not daunted by the 
report, called upon him, followed him into his 
magnificent garden, and, after discussing the fruits 
of the season till his host seemed to be in good 
humor, sat down with him on a bench in the 
arbor, and told him his errand. The old man 
drew himself up, and said, in hackneyed pride, 
" Sir, my religion lies between me and my God. 
When I feel the need of other aid, I will send for 
you." The pastor grasped his hand, and replied, 
" My friend, you and I may both be in eternity 
long before that time. I can not afford to wait, if 
you can." In three minutes the sinner of sixty 
years was weeping like a child. He confessed 
that for weeks he had been contending with the 
spirit of God. 

In this matter of personal fidelity to the souls 
of men, I must regard him as a model pastor. He 
had little confidence in the usefulness of a pastor 
whom his people saw only or chiefly in the pulpit. 
Volumes would be required to relate the narrative 
of his pastoral faithfulness and its reward. The 
staple theme of conversation in his home was the 
salvation of men. I well remember the novelty 
of the discovery to me when I left home, and 
learned that there were clerical families in which 
this was not true. The home-life of my father for 
years led me to interpret literally the apostolic 
injunctions respecting " holy conversation." He 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 25 

read little in those years of revival : he had no 
time for it, outside of the work of his pulpit. Yet 
I remember heavy additions to his library made 
at that time. His first purchase of a copy of 
Shakspeare occurred then. But his life's work 
was that of preaching Christ publicly, and from 
house to house. The " Apostle to the Gentiles " 
could scarcely have given himself more devotedly 
to that one thing. 

Still his life did not make on an observer the im- 
pression of professional routine. It had the look 
of the natural adjustment to the conditions of his 
calling. It was not the contraction of a narrow 
mind : it was the intensity of a concentrated 
mind. Whatever may be true of other professions, 
that of a Christian pastor, whose work God may 
at any time cover with foreshado wings of the day 
of judgment, by a mysterious awakening of the 
popular conscience, must command these two ele- 
ments of executive force, — mental intensity and 
mental unity. A cooler temperament, or a more 
complex and reticulated life, can not meet the de- 
mands of the situation. The successes which 
great awakenings indicate are never achieved by 
such a life. 



III. 

A PASTOE OF THE LAST GENEKATION. 

PART III. 

The results of my father's labors were much 
beyond those which are commonly appreciable 
and tangible in the experience of pastors. It is 
the life-long trial of some good men, that their 
life's work is so absorbed in general currents of 
influence, that they can not lay their hand upon 
this thing or that, and say, " This is my reward." 
His work was not thus buried from his own sight. 
He modestly estimated the number of those who 
attributed their conversion directly to his words 
as about one thousand. Those who knew better 
than he did the fruits of his work outside of his 
own churches doubled that number. 

In one respect his work strikingly resembled 
that of Dr. Finney, though it was not nearly so 
extensive. Multitudes of church-members who 
had lived under fatalistic conceptions of divine 
grace believed themselves to have been enlight- 
ened, and first really converted, by the blessing 
of God upon his preaching. The cases were con- 
stantly occurring of men and women who were 

26 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 27 

relieved from life-long bondage or from skepticism 
by his methods of presenting the Calvinistic type 
of theology. Persons from distant places used to 
seek his counsel, under awakenings of conscience 
produced by casually hearing a sermon from his 
lips. Methodists and Quakers came to him with 
their denominational objections to high Calvinism, 
and left him, saying, that, " if he was not right in 
his theology, he was a most dangerous man ; for 
he hard a marvelous power to make the wrong 
seem right." Cases of conscience were brought 
to him in large numbers for adjudication. Many 
infidels, also, were first silenced, and then appar- 
ently converted, by their first hearing of the 
gospel, in the New-England methods of interpre- 
tation, in his pulpit or at the parsonage. Thus 
presented, it seemed to them for the first time a 
credible system of truth. 

The waves of spiritual awakening which during 
those years rolled over the interior and western 
counties of New York, were interpreted by him as 
being philosophically the natural re-action from a 
fatalistic type of Calvinism to one more con- 
sistent with the Scriptures and with the necessary 
beliefs of men. The biography of Dr. Finney 
gives ample evidence of the correctness of this 
view. Gross distortions of the Calvinistic the- 
ology had got possession of the popular faith 
throughout large sections of the central and west- 
ern counties. Errors they were, which nobody — 
Old School, or New, or neither — ever preached. 



28 My Portfolio. 

They illustrated the principle which justifies even 
a fastidious care for soundness in the faith, — that 
the popular theology is sure to reduce to carica- 
ture the plausible error of him who teaches it. 
That which in him is only a moderate foreshorten- 
ing of perspective becomes in it a grotesque mon- 
strosity. He puts together golden treasures in 
the effort to create a god, and there comes out a 
calf. Human nature everywhere has a Pagan 
propensity to fetichism. It had full swing in the 
popular forms of Calvinism in Western New York, 
previous to the great awakening under Dr. Finney. 
It would be a libel upon any school of divinity 
to hold it responsible for those enormous freaks 
of fatalism which Dr. Finney and his coadjutors 
had to encounter. Buried beneath that mass of 
rubbish, there lay a vast amount of pure truth in 
the popular convictions. It had been planted 
there by earnest and godly men of the Old School. 
The elements of a religious revival were all there : 
they needed only the men endued with the revi- 
val temperament, and possessed of a scriptural 
and rational theology, and blessed of God as he 
is wont to bless such men when called to his 
work, to set the whole heavens in a glow with the 
reflection of light from enkindled altars. It was 
my father's privilege to be one of the chosen in- 
struments in that work. Evangelists achieved a 
wider reputation than his ; but few pastors of his 
generation, or of ours, have been so signally re- 
warded. 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 29 

It was in those days a question vital to the 
character of a minister, How does he stand af- 
fected towards the institution of slavery? My 
father, by natural temperament, was not a conser- 
vative, and he was not a radical. On almost all 
subjects he saw two sides of things. But, if the 
course of events compelled him to appear to side 
with either extreme, he was apt to drift towards 
the side of the radical. He refused his pulpit to 
an abolitionist lecturer of the long haired and 
bearded school, because, he said, his people had 
rights there which he was bound to respect ; but, 
if a fugitive slave applied to him for food and a 
hiding-place, he fell back on first principles, and 
bade his fellow-man welcome to both. He would 
not go out of his way as a Christian minister to 
hunt up an " underground railroad." He said that 
God had not ordained him to that business. But, 
if the " underground railroad " passed by his door, 
he used it without clerical or political scruple. 
Several fugitives owed their liberty to his aid. He 
would not take the platform with Mr. Garrison, 
because he-revered the Scriptures and the church 
of Christ more than he did anybody's civil free- 
dom. But, whenever he encountered antislavery 
free from infidel adjuncts, he gave it the hand of 
fellowship with all his heart. He never advised 
black men to go to Liberia. The Colonization 
Society was to his view organized folly : he used 
to say, that, as a political scheme, it was a fraud, 
and, as a missionary scheme, a farce. With the 



30 My Portfolio. 

exception of this distrust of African colonization, 
he represented fairly the general antislavery policy 
of the Northern clergy of his day. It is a libel 
upon them to portray them otherwise. 

He once employed for several months a run- 
away negro as a laborer. One morning the rumor 
came that John's master was at the hotel, within 
a pistol-shot of the parsonage, that he had ob- 
tained a warrant for the arrest of his chattel, and 
that he had a leash of dogs on hand for the hunt. 
Geneva attracted slave-hunters at that time ; be- 
cause, besides being near the border-line of Canada, 
it was the seat of a negro colony of some three 
hundred, nearly all the adults being runaways. I 
suppose it would have cost the pastor his pulpit, 
if the deed of that day had been known. The 
United-States marshal of the district was one of 
his parishioners. It is sufficient token of the 
dominant politics of that period, that it was on 
the eve of the election of Martin Van Bur en, a 
favorite son of New York, to the presidency. 
Among the pastor's flock were magnates to whom 
the " Union and the Constitution " were second 
only to the oracles of God. 

But the shield was turned now in his vision; 
and John appeared to have rights, which, pulpit 
or no pulpit, must not be ignored by a minister of 
Christ. He resolved that John should have fair 
pla3 T . He asked him if he wanted to go back to 
Maryland. John thought not. But had he not 
left a wife in Maryland ? Yes ; but he had 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 31 

"anoder one" in Geneva. She was " black but 
comely," and had borne him two children. His 
Maryland master had not taught him very clear 
notions of the marriage-tie. On the whole, he 
thought "he'd sooner die than leave the picka- 
ninnies." "If he went back, his master would 
sell him South." " He'd rather go to hell." " He 
reckoned he wouldn't be took alive." " He'd take 
his chance with the hounds." 

As the market stood in those days, he was worth 
taking alive, if the hounds could be kept off from 
the jugular vein. He was a stout "six-footer," 'in 
the prime of manhood; a bright mulatto, with 
white brains, sound in wind and limb ; his teeth 
would bear counting on the auction-block, and he 
was a trained mechanic withal : in return for 
some teaching which I gave him, he had taught 
me how to shingle a barn. The master's title, too, 
was beyond a doubt : his broad back was branded 
very legibly. My father told him he hoped nobody 
would have to die ; but he added some advice, in 
tones too low for me to hear, but with a compres- 
sion of the mouth which was well understood in 
the discipline of the family. He then told John 
to take to a certain piece of woods, and wait there, 
while he himself went to the hotel to reconnoiter. 

John crept around the barn of the hotel to a 
little cabin, where " the pickaninnies " were rolling 
in the dirt, and was soon ranging the woods. A 
few hours after, the pastor returned, with lips more 
sternly compressed than ever, and proceeded to 



32 My Portfolio. 

make up a basket of food for John. He brought 
it to me, and told me to go with it, and find him. 
My father's eye silently answered mine when I 
observed that the knife was not the mate of the 
fork, that it was too large to be covered in the 
basket, that, in short, it was the largest carver in 
the house, — the one with which John had not 
long before slaughtered a pig. It was as nearly a 
facsimile of a bowie-knife as the credit of the par- 
sonage ought to bear. I found John. His eye, 
too, alighted first on the familiar knife. The grim 
smile of his savage ancestors gleamed around his 
white teeth. He played with the food, but treas- 
ured the knife in his bosom. Said he, as I took 
his hand at parting, " Tell your fader that he is a 
Christian and a gemman, ebery inch of him." 
His ideas of what Christianity is may have been 
rather mixed (he had learned them at the whip- 
ping-post) ; but his half-savage intuitions of what 
Christianity ought to do for a hunted man were 
not far wrong. So, at least, the pastor thought. 
It was well for dog and master that they did not 
find John's trail. Indeed, I suspect the dogs were 
left at the hotel. Even Martin Van Buren's con- 
stituents in a livery-stable would hardly have 
winked at that business on the soil of New York. 
Human nature has an innate reverence for the 
jugular vein. 

My father's prayer with us that night was 
unusually solemn. He remembered both the slave 
and the slave-hunter. In no other event of his 



A Pastor of the Last Greneration. 33 

life known to me did the old blood of England's 
Ironsides leap to view so vividly as in that deed 
and that prayer of loyalty to human liberty. Yes, 
his Christianity was of that sort. Yet nineteen- 
twentieths of the Northern clergy of his generation 
would have done the same, although some of those 
very men — not a great many of them — after- 
wards preached in defense of the fugitive slave- 
law. It is one thing to sermonize in one's study 
by candle-light, and with feet incased in warm 
slippers : it is quite another thing to set dogs on 
the trail of a panting man in the woods in broad 
day. Blessed be the inconsistencies of good men ! 
Ah, how far back in the middle ages those days 
seem now ! Were beasts ever brought from Mary- 
land to hunt men on the banks of silvery Lake 
Seneca, within sight of the tower of Hobart Col- 
lege? Did living man ever think to set blood- 
hounds on the track of a woman, where their 
baying would be answered by vesper-bells from 
the belfry of a Christian church ? v 

My father's pastoral preaching was terminated 
suddenly. An attack of the Asiatic cholera, the 
infection of which he caught in the course of his 
pastoral duty, brought him to death's door. He 
was given up by his physicians, and was supposed 
to be in the stage of speechless collapse, when he 
suddenly spoke, and prescribed for himself the 
means of cure. He believed ever afterwards that 
he was divinely guided in the extremity to the 
saving of his life. To the physician it was only 



34 My Portfolio. 

one of the mysterious instances in which nature 
springs upon disease from ambuscade, and con- 
quers. 

But the caustic remedies which had been before 
employed shattered his nervous system, so that 
he never again felt able to resume the labors of a 
settled pastor. He resigned his charge at Geneva, 
and in 1836 removed to Philadelphia, to take 
the secretaryship of the American Education So- 
ciety there, and afterwards at New York also. 
He labored in the usual routine of those offices 
till advancing years obliged him to retire from all 
continuous public service. 

As my main object is to portray his pastoral 
life, in which, in my judgment, his chief usefulness 
was achieved, I will not here detail his work as a 
counselor, and one of the executives, always in 
the interest of union, in the controversy which 
sundered the Presbyterian Church. Suffice it to 
say, that he was the supporter and personal friend 
and parishioner of the Rev. Albert Barnes ; if I 
remember rightly, was a member of the General 
Assembly which acquitted Mr. Barnes of the 
charge of heresy; was for two years the anony- 
mous editor of "The Christian Observer," the 
organ of the New School men of Philadelphia; 
and was one of the New School Assembly which 
formed itself, when, after the exscinding acts of 
1837, Mr. Barnes, Dr. Beman, Dr. Cox, Dr. Beech- 
er, and others, were, like himself, refused seats in 
the Assembly of 1838. 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 35 

He did not enjoy that controversial work. His 
heart was elsewhere. He entered the Presbyte- 
rian Church in that spirit of fraternal comity which 
then united it, in sympathy with the Congrega- 
tional churches of New England, under the " Plan 
of Union," and the loss of which has been of no 
benefit to either. He labored for Presbyterian 
interests in good faith, as long as his official con- 
nections bound him in honor to them ; but he was 
always at heart a Congregationalist. His expe- 
rience in the Presbyterian " camp," as he used to 
call it, intensified his attachment to the polity of 
his fathers. It was his favorite theory, that the 
male adult members of a Presbyterian church 
ought all of them to be elected to the eldership. 
His Scotch brethren in the presbytery never took 
the joke. 

It was after his retirement from public life that 
he became interested in Spiritualism. It would 
be more truthful to say that it became interested 
in him ; for it came upon him without his seek- 
ing, suddenly invading his household, and making 
a pandemonium of it for seven months, and then 
departing as suddenly as it came. The phenome- 
na resembled those which for many years afflicted 
the Wesley family, and those which at one time 
attended the person of Oberlin. They were an 
almost literal repetition of some of the records 
left by Cotton Mather. Had my father lived in 
1650 instead of 1850, he and his family would 
have lived in history with the victims on Tower 



36 My Portfolio. 

Hill in Salem. That the facts were real, a thou- 
sand witnesses testified. An eminent judge in 
the State of New York said that he had pro- 
nounced sentence of death on many a criminal on 
a tithe of the evidence which supported those 
facts. That they were inexplicable by any known 
principles of science was equally clear to all who 
saw and heard them, who were qualified to judge. 
Experts in science went to Stratford in trium- 
phant expectation, and came away in dogged 
silence, convinced of nothing, yet solving nothing. 
If modern science had nothing to show more 
worthy of respect than its solutions of Spiritual- 
ism, alchemy would be its equal, and astrology 
infinitely its superior. It will never do to con- 
sign a delusion so seductive to the ignorant, and 
so welcome to the skeptic, to the limbo of " an if," 
and leave it there. 

To my father the whole thing was a visitation 
from God. He bowed to the affliction in sorrow 
and in prayer. He never gave credence to it as a 
revelation of religious truth for an hour. The 
only point in which it affected his interpretation 
of the Scriptures was that of the biblical demon- 
ology. When science failed to give him an ex- 
planation which deserved respect, he fell back 
upon the historic faith of the Christian Church in 
the personality and activity of angels, good and 
evil. He held the scriptural demonology as a 
tentative explanation of Spiritualism until science 
could furnish something better. But long before 



A Pastor of the Last Generation. 37 

his decease he had lost his interest in it; and 
during the last two years of his life it had proba- 
bly faded from his memory. When thanksgiving 
for the "precious blood of Christ" was often 
heard from his chamber, he was sometimes prompt 
to deny that the mysteries of Stratford had ever 
existed, so little impression had they left upon 
him as the origin of any thing in his religious 
faith. 

The closing years of his life were years of hal- 
lowed peace. With the exception of a treacherous 
memory, he retained his mental faculties till the 
last half-year. His forecast of the world's future 
was youthful in its hopefulness. It had always 
been so. Great and good things he had witnessed 
in his day, but greater and better were looming in 
the eastern horizon. Young ministers it was his 
wont to congratulate on their privilege of living 
in the coming age. I never but once heard from 
him a word which indicated that he would not 
gladly live his life over again. To spend a half- 
hour with him was itself a benediction. His 
youthful pastor at Weehawken " counted it as the 
chief blessing of his ministry that it gave him 
the privilege of communion with the old prophet 
on the eve of his translation." 

Of the final scene of still and painless ascension, 
what shall I say? — "My father, my father, the 
chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof." 



iy. 

THE EIGHTS OP BELIEVEES IS ANOIENT OEEEDS. 

PART L 

The integrity of assent to venerable creeds is 
sometimes questioned, and scruples respecting it 
are sometimes felt through the ignoring of certain 
vital principles. 

1. The professed believer in such a creed is en- 
titled to a recognition of the inevitable changes which 
time brings about in the meaning of language. 
Words are not eternal. No precision of science 
can make them so. The history of lexicography 
shows that words may slide down the scale of 
departure from their original sense till they reach 
its flat contradiction. 

Dr. Barrow says that "men ought to cherish a 
fit resentment towards God." The word "resent- 
ment " once signified the return of grateful af- 
fection for favor received. It signifies just the 
opposite now. 

In some theological systems, and not very dis- 
tant either, the words " guilt " and " punishment " 
had meanings which no popular usage now affixes 
to them, if popular use ever did accept them. 

38 



The Rights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 39 

"Guilt" meant exposure to the consequences of 
sin; "punishment," the suffering of those conse- 
quences. In such dialect, innocence might be 
"guilty," saints might suffer "punishment," our 
blessed Lord might bear the punishment of a 
world's transgressions. Men have, therefore, been 
pronounced guilty of Adam's sin, and threat- 
ened with punishment for that sin, by divines who 
never meant to teach that which would now be 
understood by such language. They meant only 
that men are exposed to, and do suffer, the conse- 
quences of Adam's sin. They no more meant that 
men are ill deserving for the sin of Adam than 
that the son of a thief deserves the penitentiary 
for the father's crime. 

We are horrified when a venerable father of the 
Church declares that Christ was guilty of the sins 
of the elect, and that he suffered punishment in 
their stead. But many who have used such phra- 
seology never understood by it what it seems to 
say to modern ears. A modern believer of such 
a creed, then, is not to be censured, if he interprets 
it, not by the modern lexicon, but by the ancient 
and technical theological usage. 

2. He has also the right to interpret a creed, in 
part, by the history of its formation. All the great 
confessions of the Church are historic monuments : 
so are some of the creeds of our ancient local 
churches. They are landmarks of Christian opin- 
ion. They grew up in crises: they grew out of 
periods of agitation. New dangers threatened the 



40 My Portfolio. 

faith of the Church, or new inspiration enlight- 
ened and expanded it; and hence a new creed 
was born to express the new intellectual and 
spiritual life. Internal conflicts of opinion, or 
conflicts with infidelity outside, have usually been 
the immediate cause of the creation of standards 
of Christian faith. 

That precedent and contemporaneous history 
could not fail to color the significance of the con- 
fession of faith to which it gave birth. Like cause, 
like effect. Local exigencies, national crises, the 
convulsions of an age, gave peculiar senses to 
terms; they emphasized favorite phrases; they 
loaded old words with new forces; they often 
wrenched words out of popular into technical 
usage. Some words they shelved in the archives 
of scholastic thought, and left them there to die. 
Not one of the standard creeds of the Church is 
a perfectly fair, calm, equipoised compendium of 
revealed truth, unbiased by the temper of the 
times, by the infirmities of blinded science, and 
specially by the crudities of philosophical schools. 
Not one of them has the serene beauty of inspired 
proportions. They are all standards of the mili- 
tant church. They are symbols of opinion boiling 
in the crucible of conflicting and often intemper- 
ate thought. They have, therefore, a belligerent 
outlook, — one this way, another that. They ex- 
alt some truths unduly, and depress others. Like 
the valleys and mountains of the globe, they are 
the product of volcanic cataclysms. Some of them 



The Rights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 41 

contain gorges like those of Gondo and the Via 
Mala. Spots there are in them on which the sun 
never shone. 

The history of such a creed is essential to its 
interpretation. The modem believer has the right 
to go back, and unearth that buried record. He 
must do so in order to know what the authors of 
that creed really meant. Its language he has the 
right often to interpret by what they meant, rather 
than by what to modern ears they seem to have 
said. He is not to be held to account, but ap- 
plauded rather, if he lets in the light of other days 
upon the obscure inscription. In adopting it as 
his own, he may honestly give to it a meaning 
somewhat other than that seen by the cursory 
reader of to-day. 

In the creed of the Andover Seminary it is 
declared that man has " corporeal strength to do 
all that God requires of him." To one not well 
read in the theological controversies of New Eng- 
land, this seems very odd, if not absurd, phrase- 
ology. What can it mean? Have grave and 
learned men met in conclave to bind the instruct- 
ors of the clergy through all time to teach that 
men have power of blood and bones and sinews 
and muscles to do God's bidding? Wise men 
have debated the power of angels to dance on the 
point of a needle, and have essayed to count them 
in their sport. But when did ever theological 
wisdom muddle itself with such a crotchet of " hu- 
man ability " as this ? 



42 My Portfolio. 

But a little fragment of history solves the rid- 
dle. Among the founders of the Andover Semi- 
nary, two schools of theology were represented. 
Two seminaries were, in fact, in embryo, before 
the friends of either knew of the conception of 
the other. It was of great moment that the 
strength of the New-England churches, then de- 
pleted severely by the Unitarian departure, should 
not be wasted in the support of antagonist schools 
of divinity. The founders of the one held stoutly 
to what was then called the " natural ability " of 
man to do all that God required of him. The 
founders of the other as stoutly denied this. The 
very phrase had become odious to them. It ex- 
pressed a pestilent heresy. The Presbyterian 
Church, thirty years later, was exploded into 
halves by it. 

How to bring the two embryo schools into one 
was the problem. For a long time it was a vexed 
one. Mr. Phillips's farms at Andover, and Mr. 
Norris's keg of silver dollars over which he prayed 
for the divine acceptance, were waiting for their 
reverend pastors and teachers to agree upon a 
creed which should bear the test of all coming 
time. It would not do for Dr. Spring and his 
associates to insist on the technical yet most obvi- 
ous language of the New School, by saying that 
men have "natural ability." Dr. Morse and his 
friends of the Old School would have flung them- 
selves off in a tangent from such a heresy. Ovei 
one of the points of controversy between them. 



The Rights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 43 

said one of the leaders, " We will see the seminary 
sunk in the sea, before we will set our hands to 
such a dogma." Therefore the creed of the 
united body, in which all came together harmless 
as doves, if not wise as serpents, was made to read 
that man has "corporeal strength to do all that 
God requires." 

A poor substitute this for " natural ability," as 
read by the rhetoric of to-day ; but any thing was 
better than eternal war over two words. Thus 
Massachusetts escaped the subsequent theological 
history of Connecticut. In the light of such an 
episode of history the modern subscriber to the 
creed has a right mentally to restore, if he pleases, 
the more accurate phrase, "natural ability," in 
place of the crude substitute. " Natural ability " 
was what they all meant, if they had but known 
it. It is right for their modern successors to 
say so. 

3. The foregoing piece of history suggests also 
that the signer of an ancient creed has a right to 
recognize and reason from well-known compromises 
contained in the creed. All the great symbols of 
the Church's faith are compromises. From the 
nature of the case they must be such. They must 
have been such in the intent of their originators. 
No political platform of a great party is possible 
in other shape than that of compromise. The 
same is true of the Confession of any great section 
of the Church. In no other way can the accord- 
ant faith of a multitude of earnest and wide- 



44 My Portfolio. 

awake minds be expressed in language. In every 
such body of thinkers the Left yields something 
to the Right, and the Right yields something to 
the Left, and the Centre gives way somewhat 
to both. Probably no creed was ever formed, or 
can be, to be the standard of a large body of 
believers, which any one of its original framers 
could accept as the exact and sufficient symbol of 
his own belief, without abatement and without 
supplement. Every man of them had his own 
gloss to put upon that or this : all had an appen- 
dix of memoranda and errata in their own minds. 

The Westminster Catechism was such a compro- 
mise ; so was the Augsburg Confession ; so, too, 
the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, 
and the Confession of Dort. To an ear wonted 
to the clang of theological debate, the silver ring 
of compromise is audible in them all. 

This fact of historic compromise is often a very 
pregnant one to a modern believer in defining the 
sense of the words he accepts. He is entitled to 
the full benefit of it : nay, he is bound in honor 
not to ignore it. He has the right to say that a 
certain extreme of theological dogma which some 
may find in the creed, and would force upon him, 
is not there, because it is contradictory to the 
spirit of the compromise in which the creed was 
framed. 

We have been told, for instance, that the New- 
England theology can not be honestly held in the 
terms of the Westminster Catechism, and there- 



The Rights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 45 

fore that the New-England theologian can not 
honorably subscribe that Confession. We deny 
it, partly on the ground of what the Catechism 
expressly affirms, but partly, also, on the ground 
of the compromise which historically it represents. 
There were men in the Westminster Assembly 
who held the essential points of the New-School 
theology of our day; not in modern phrase in- 
deed: they did not hold any thing in modern 
phrase. But in language of their own, equally 
significant, they held to the freedom of the human 
will and its inevitable corollaries. They never 
would have given their names to a creed designed, 
as they understood it, to deny that necessary be- 
lief of the human mind. 

Under cover of their wing, all other New-School 
believers to the end of time may honestly sub- 
scribe that Confession as teaching, and meant to 
teach, the essentials of their own theology. What- 
ever some phrases of the Catechism, without his- 
toric note or comment, may seem to say, the docu- 
ment as a whole can not have been designed to 
teach a fatalistic type of Calvinism, because of the 
historic fact of compromise between those who 
held that type and those who denied it. Men 
were there, and they signed their names to the 
work of the Assembly, who never would have 
done so, if, in their own judgment or that of 
their associates, that act held them to the dogma 
of unmitigated fatalism. 

Even the Confession of Dort, adopted by per- 



46 My Portfolio. 

haps the most rigidly Calvinistic body of divines 
ever convened in equal numbers, can not properly 
be so interpreted that a New-School theologian 
may not honestly accept it with his interpretation ; 
for the spirit of compromise was there also. 
Marks of it are visible in certain paragraphs which 
could have no other purpose. 

Said one of the leaders of that famous conclave, 
in the course of their discussions, quoting, proba- 
bly, from a similar utterance in the Council of 
Trent, " I believe in both the decrees of God and 
the responsibility of man, because I believe in cer- 
tainty with power to the contrary." There was the 
central principle of the New-England theology. 
The Rev. Dr. Taylor of New Haven, and the Rev. 
Albert Barnes of Philadelphia, its latest repre- 
sentatives, and the defenders of it in its final 
fruitage, never got beyond that principle. No man 
who held it could have set his hand to a creed 
which was, as those of Dort and Westminster are 
often claimed to be, fatalistic through and through. 



THE EIGHTS OF BELIEVERS DT ANCIENT OEEEDS. 

PART II. 

4. The compromises of ecclesiastical standards, 
to which allusion has been made, suggest a fourth 
principle, which should in equity regulate the 
modern indorsement of them. It is, that the 
believer has a right to his own method of recon- 
ciling the contradictions of a creed. 

Where is the historic creed, which, strictly inter- 
preted, does not involve self-contradictions ? So 
many and so profound are the opposites in truth, 
that human speech can scarcely utter them vigor- 
ously, except in forms of statement which crowd 
opposites into contraries. Of course they are not 
contraries, but vivid statement makes them ap- 
pear such. The best conceptions of them by 
earnest thinkers seem irreconcilable. The think- 
ing of an age which forces a great creed into 
being will express its standard formulae in no 
wary or diplomatic shape. These come forth 
rather in weighted if not impassioned language. 
They leap, full-grown, into stalwart frame, like 
the mail-clad warriors of the age in which they 

47 



48 My Portfolio. 

are born. They seem as if heralded by challenge 
to battle to all comers. 

These opposites, of which all deepest truth is 
full, the authors of the great Confessions have 
commonly chosen to express, as the Duke of 
Wellington said all contradictions should be 
14 reconciled," — 44 Never explain contradictions, 
but assert both extremes vehemently." So the 
contradictions of historic creeds are not loaded 
with philosophic adjustments in nice and trembling 
balance, but with unqualified assertions rather of 
both belligerents. There is more of sound phi- 
losophy than appears at the first blush in this ap- 
parent ignoring of philosophy. Such truths as 
election and ability, decrees and prayer, regenera- 
tion and repentance, the deity of our Lord and 
his humanity, the peril of apostasy and the per- 
severance of the saints, can not well be so for- 
mulated as either to awaken an earnest faith, or 
to express it, except in language, which, to say 
the least, borders hard upon downright contrariety. 
The deepest thinking must evolve them in such 
militant shape, or fail to reach by them the deepest 
feeling. 44 Deep calleth unto deep." The collision 
is but the mingling of mighty waters. 

The existence of such seeming contradictions 
in the standard Confessions of Christendom must 
be conceded. Then, to each believer must be 
granted the independent right to his own way of 
reconciling them. Each must be allowed to have 
his own philosophy. It is his right to dovetail 



The Rights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 49 

things by his own mechanism. Wide asunder as 
the poles the philosophies may be : that matters 
not. Sufficient is it, if the resulting faith, as a 
whole, is held fast, and honest hands clasp each 
other. My philosophy may be the mumbling of 
idiocy to you, and yours may be the raving of 
mania to me ; yet we may both be honest men, 
true believers, and as clear-headed as the average 
of men in accepting the same form of sound words. 
Your perspective of truth may bring to the fore- 
ground a doctrine which mine would thrust to the 
rear; yours may lay bare to the tropic sunlight 
a truth which mine would veil in a lunar twilight ; 
yours may exalt God, and mine may arouse man ; 
you may preach sovereignty, and I may preach 
duty ; you may bow reverently before our Lord's 
divinity, and I may cling tremblingly to his human- 
ity. What matters it ? Each must say, " This is 
my infirmity." Let us be glad, if, even inconsist- 
ently, we join hands after all. 

Our grandest creeds — those which have done 
best service to the Church, and have gathered to 
themselves the wealth of the ages in the reverent 
affection of believers — are meant to embrace such 
diversities of temperament, and of mental idiosyn- 
crasy, and of national tastes, and of the bias of 
race, yet to bind them all in the unity of the 
spirit and the bond of peace. So must we be 
content to receive them. It is my right to inter- 
pret your favorite dogma by the balancing oppo- 
site in mine. We must not peck at each other's 



50 My Portfolio. 

eyeballs, because each prefers to look out from 
his favorite eyry. We both see through a glass 
darkly. We must not pry too curiously into each 
other's methods of deliverance from self-contradic- 
tion. We are neither of us hypocrites for not 
petting each other's philosophies. 

5. The believer of an ancient Confession is 
entitled also, within certain limits, to a help, which, 
for the want of a better definition, I will call, The 
logic of the drift of a creed. Great symbols of 
the life of the Church mean often more than they 
say. They are symbols not only of a fixed faith, 
never of a perfectly finished faith, but of a blind 
reaching after unknown discovery. They are 
landmarks of a line of march, of which the final 
fortress is not yet reached. 

John Robinson's imperial message, "God has 
more truth yet to break forth from his Holy 
Word," is hinted at in a certain leaning-for- 
ward of our best Confessions into the thought of 
subsequent ages. They read like prophecies. 
We interpret them by their fulfillment in the 
work of later thinkers. Their reverent authors 
seem as if hearkening for the voice of new 
revelations. They evidently believed more than 
they have recorded for our instruction. They 
were men of progress. They had unspoken 
visions. Had they lived to our times, they 
would have seen more truth, and proclaimed it 
authoritatively. They would have proportioned 
and balanced and shaded Christian doctrines 



The Rights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 51 

more architecturally. They would have heard 
more distinctly the music of the spheres. We 
can not help seeing, in what they did declare, the 
signs of what they would have taught, and where 
their convictions would have ranked them among 
the theologians of to-day. The drift of their 
teachings necessitates the admission of more 
truth, like the discovery of Neptune through 
Leverrier's foresight. 

This logic of the drift of a great system of 
theology it is the right of a modern believer to 
recognize, and, within certain limits, to use as a 
help to its intepretation. He is at liberty to read 
between the lines. He may, for instance, qualify 
extremes by the hints of their unspoken opposites. 
In short, he may interpret the system as a whole 
by its obvious and indubitable though bungling 
sympathy with the discoveries of later times. 

" Within certain limits," I repeat. True, this 
is a perilous principle. It can be easily abused. 
So may all the vital principles which govern 
speech. But it is a true principle, and valuable, 
nevertheless. In the thinking of a reverent and 
ingenuous mind it may serve to relieve a creed 
from downright absurdities. 

This principle is of special value in the inter- 
pretation of those portions of the creeds which 
concern the freedom of the human will, and its 
theological corollaries. 1 On this subject, truth 

1 One or two paragraphs in this connection have appeared in 
another volume by the author. 



52 My Portfolio. 

has been of slow and toilsome growth. She has 
crept and limped up the great highway of human 
opinion. With a great sum obtained we this 
freedom. Pagan theology everywhere was and is 
saturated to the point of stupor with fatalism. 
The early Christian thought was drugged with 
the same poison. The clear enunciation of the 
liberty of the human will, and the consistent 
teaching of the consequent truth of man's abili- 
ty, has been, in the main, the product of the 
Christian thinking of the last two hundred years. 
We owe it largely to the political and civil history 
of the Netherlands. 

Some of the historic creeds of Christendom, 
therefore, are wofully disproportioned on this 
class of doctrines. They qualify to death what 
they have affirmed, and raise from the dead what 
they have disowned. They emphasize the sover- 
eignty of God, and blur the responsibility of man. 
They thunder the doctrine of decrees, and whisper 
or stammer the truth of man's ability. In all that 
renders God august and terrible, their sound is the 
blast of a trumpet. In all that should quicken 
man's consciousness of moral dignity and duty, 
their voice is but the reverberation of a distant 
and doubtful echo. Sometimes man's ability to 
do his duty is taught by inference only. Yet in 
them all are to be found hints of it and of its 
kindred doctrines. Implications of them abound. 
Leanings-forward and outstretched hands are visi- 
ble towards the more absolute forms of them in 
our modern theology. 



The Rights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 53 

It is right, therefore, to read such creeds in the 
light of their obvious drift in this respect. Pre- 
monitions of later discoveries in theologic science 
are as much a part of the creeds as their plain 
record of the earlier theologic beliefs. We must 
admit and trust those premonitions. In no other 
way can we come at the whole mind of the ven- 
erable authors of our standards. Not otherwise, 
it may be, can we save a revered symbol of our 
faith from absolute hostility to modern beliefs, 
and a revolt of the sympathies of our own times. 
Not otherwise can we preserve to our theologic 
formulae the support of historic prestige, for the 
want of which we labor at such disadvantage in 
the controversy with the Church of Rome. As 
the world grows older, the prestige of age becomes 
more and more valuable in the standards which 
claim its religious faith. Other things being equal, 
those will sway the future who bring to its con- 
quest the heaviest forces and swiftest momentum 
of the past. 

6. The believer in an ancient Confession of 
Faith has the right to subscribe it as a whole, with- 
out being held to indorsement of its every detail. 
Literalists may sneer as they will at the phrase 
" for substance of doctrine ; " but the use of it 
is a sheer necessity to the adoption of any creed in 
any age by any multitude of thinking men. 

Still more necessary is it in the profession of a 
creed inherited from ancestral standards. Water, 
even iron, may be made to run in grooves : not so 



54 My Portfolio. 

thought. In the great essentials of a great faith, 
independent minds in innumerable hosts may 
accord for ever; but in the minutiae of incident 
and of diction, and specially of shading and pro- 
portion, never, even in dozens and for an hour. 
They never have done it. They never will. 
The Architect of mind has not so made mind. 
Only in profoundest ignorance and brutish vacu- 
ity of thought can literal uniformity of faith exist. 
Only under the hoof of ecclesiastical tyranny will 
the enforcement of it be attempted. 

The examiners of a candidate for one of the 
chairs in the Andover Seminary once sounded him 
upon his reading of the Westminster Confession. 
He assented to it "for substance of doctrine." 
One of the reverend fathers demurred. Another, 
the late Rev. Dr. Humphrey of Amherst College, 
whom none will accuse of theological vagaries, 
replied, " No mortal man with a mind of his own 
ever accepted the Westminster Catechism with- 
out qualifications of his own." He was right. 
The same is true of any Confession, unless it be 
some brief compendium of historic fact rather than 
of doctrine, like the Apostles' Creed. He must not, 
then, be held to account as a trickster who signs 
reverently our elaborate and ancient standards 
"for substance of doctrine." Nor should the con- 
science of any believer be goaded by condemning 
scruples for doing the same thing in accepting the 
creed of the local church. It is his right. In 
doing it he is only doing that which its very 



The Rights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 55 

authors did when it expressed their freshest 
thought. Such qualification of assent is a neces- 
sity to all consensus of many minds to an instru- 
ment constructed by a distant generation, and 
elaborated by the ablest thinking of its age. 

7. The foregoing principles need to be qualified 
by one other, to prevent abuse. It is, that the sub- 
scriber to one of the ancient creeds has no right 
to mutilate by his interpretation the great structural 
elements of that creed which make it what it is, and 
which, in one form or another, all the great historic 
Confessions affirm. I refer here to those Confes- 
sions only which may fairly be taken as expressing 
the matured and complete faith of the Church, dat- 
ing from the Athanasian Creed downward; not 
those which represent its infantile attempts at 
systematic belief, nor those constructed chiefly to 
counteract partial errors. 

These historic creeds, expressing the present 
faith of Christendom, are attempts to do what the 
Scriptures do not profess to do, — to reduce the 
Christian faith to system. Infirmly yet intelligi- 
bly they have done this. They all contain a cer- 
tain rounded structure, in which certain doctrines 
fit in to each other, and are emphasized as essen- 
tials. Respecting those central and essential 
truths, the authors of the great Confessions never 
meant to compromise. They felt no need of com- 
promise. So far, they saw eye to eye. The evolu- 
tion of belief through ages of discussion has 
tended not to obscure or to qualify those grand 



56 My Portfolio. 

essentials, but to define and enforce them as the 
faith delivered to the saints. 

We commonly designate these truths as " The 
Doctrines of Grace." The being and sovereignty 
of God, the inspiration of the Bible, the depravity 
of man, the necessity of regeneration, the trini- 
ty of the Godhead, the atonement of Christ, the 
eternity of future rewards and punishments, — 
these are the essentials of the system. They fall 
naturally into accord with each other. They in- 
tensify and buttress each other. They are not 
matters of philosophy, much as we may philoso- 
phize about them. They are revealed facts. If 
one of them is compromised or denied, they all 
sooner or later suffer. It is a vital point in the 
argument for any one of them, that it is needed 
for the self-consistency and the intensity of the 
system as a whole. Abstract any one of them, 
and all the rest collapse somewhat from the full- 
ness of their meaning. The main object, therefore, 
of systematic creeds, has been to protect them one 
and all, and one as much as another. 

A believer in one of these matured and standard 
denominational creeds of the Church, therefore, 
has no right so to use the liberty of individual 
interpretation as to throw out, or to obscure, any 
one of these structural elements. He has no right 
to claim that he accepts the creed " for substance 
of doctrine," if he rejects any one of them. He 
has no authority to say that one of them is not 
essential to the system of truth which the creeds 



The Bights of Believers in Ancient Creeds. 57 

are meant to define. The overwhelming consensus 
of the Church has declared that every one of them 
is essential. The assemblies which framed the 
creeds in expression of that faith have pronounced 
them essential. 

If, then, I have a later revelation which assures 
me otherwise, so be it. The Church has no right 
to molest me in my right to believe or to deny. 
To God I stand or fall, not to man. But the 
Church has the right to say that I shall not shelter 
my denial under cover of her creeds, and claim 
therefor her fellowship and indorsement. The 
consensus of the Church Universal to the few cen- 
tral facts of the system of grace lifts them out 
of the range of individual liberty in interpreting 
the creeds which contain them. I have no right 
to use my liberty of interpretation to their de- 
struction. There they stand, stamped with the 
impress of ages of Christian belief. There they 
must stand for ever to all who would use those 
creeds as the expression of their faith, and their 
passport as religious teachers to the confidence 
of mankind. 



VI. 

THE BIBLICAL DOGTKDTE OF KETKIBUTIOIT. 

It is needful, at times, to take our theologic 
bearings anew, that we may know whither we are 
advancing. Such a necessity seems to exist at 
present respecting the doctrine of retribution. 
Three elements in it appear to demand emphasis. 

1. It is essential to the doctrine of retribution 
that it should be held with an intensity of concep- 
tion which shall justify the use of the biblical em- 
blems of the future punishment of sin. This sug- 
gests one point at which a perfectly honest mind 
may unconsciously let in a flood of error. As 
pictured rather than defined by the biblical sym- 
bols, the doctrine has an intense severity which is 
abhorrent to some of the profoundest instincts of 
our nature. The glare of it scorches the natural 
eye. We instinctively turn from it with conster- 
nation. We ask, Is there not something unreal, 
Oriental, hyperbolic, in these fearful emblems? 
Were they not designed for a bygone age ? May 
not our Occidental and modern civilization treat 
them as obsolete ? or, if not obsolete to the modern 
pulpit, should they not be restricted to preach- 

58 



The Biblical Doctrine of Retribution. 59 

ing addressed to natures exceptionally sensuous 
and depraved ? 

President Edwards's extreme and extra-biblical 
painting of the future woe has been sometimes 
defended on the ground that he was preaching to 
savages. To their notions of penal justice, fire 
was a familiar element. They used it in their own 
administration of savage law, and they bore it 
without flinching. Their torpid sensibilities could 
not be quickened into fear of God or man by any 
thing less terrific. May not the whole scenery of 
the retributive life hereafter, as depicted in the 
Scriptures, be in a similar way restricted, and to 
us made void of meaning? Down the sloping 
plane indicated by these queries, entirely honest 
and reverent inquiry on the subject may be in 
danger of sliding, to its own hurt. The danger 
grows with the growth of educated sensibilities. 

Yet, when we turn to the word of God, there 
these emblems of eternal woe stand, as real and as 
lurid as when they were first painted. What they 
meant then, they mean now. Whatever was the 
range of their application then, it is now. Fire, 
the lake of fire, the flame of brimstone, the undy- 
ing worm, the gnashing of teeth, the bottomless 
pit, the place prepared for the devil and his angels, 
— these are all as if written yesterday on a flaming 
scroll in the sky. They were uttered by One who 
came to express to the world the ultimate thoughts 
of God. No hint appears that they belong to an 
obsolescent theology. No promise is given of any 



60 My Portfolio. 

alleviation of their terrors in the coming ages. 
They were originated also by Him who came to 
represent, above all other teachings, the love of 
God. Yet not a hint is uttered that they need 
any glossary to explain them into consistency with 
the divine benevolence. The very Person of 
divine love utters them as calmly as if they were 
the picture of a summer's morning. He has left 
us no intimation that they need any reticent treat- 
ment, or that, in any golden age to come, they ever 
will need it, to vindicate the ways of God to men. 
The scroll is unrolled before our startled vision, 
and left there, think what we may of it, and do 
what we will with it. 

2. Equally essential to the integrity of the doc- 
trine of retribution is the element of its endless 
duration. Unbiased readers of the Scriptures are 
substantially a unit in the belief, that, interpreted 
as a whole, they teach this beyond reasonable 
doubt. Whatever be the sense of the crucial 
word on which this phase of the doctrine rests in 
certain proof-texts, it does not rest on that word 
alone, or in chief. The implications of the Bible 
are an invincible cordon of proof in its defense. 
As a system, the biblical theology necessitates it. 
That theology is fatally enervated, if deprived of 
this element of eternity in the threatening of penal 
justice. By the absence of it, the moral govern- 
ment of God in its penal administration is revolu- 
tionized. 

It will never do, then, for a man to say, " I be- 



The Biblical Doctrine of Retribution. 61 

lieve in retribution, in a future retribution, in a 
fearful retribution, in a retribution the magni- 
tude of which reaches to the limit of human 
thought ; I believe in all that our Lord meant by 
his intensest utterances : but of the element of 
time I affirm not ; that is not essential to the inner 
sense of the divine word." The answer is prompt 
and clear: The Scriptures do affirm of the ele- 
ment of time. They employ language which means 
that, if it means any thing. They disclose a sys- 
tem of correlated truths which are built together 
like an arch, of which not one stone can be 
spared ; and, of that system of faith, the endless- 
ness of conscious life in the suffering of penal woe 
is an element most vital to all the rest. So the 
consensus of the ages has read the record : so the 
great historic creeds of the Church have inter- 
preted and re-affirmed it. To deny it is to deny 
the authority of the common sense of men in the 
interpretation of that of which it is amply compe- 
tent to speak. 

The truth on this point may be reflected from 
another mirror. If the " time-element " is not es- 
sential to the fullness of the doctrine, why care for 
it on the side of limitation more than on that of 
eternity ? If time indefinite and time endless are 
practically the same in the intensity which they 
kindle in the doctrine, why not accept the time 
endless as the equivalent of both? Why not 
thus gain the advantage, in popular discourse at 
least, of making the Scriptures mean that which 



62 My Portfolio. 

to the popular mind they seem to mean? Why- 
change the ancient conception, if the change 
means nothing ? The fact most vital to the argu- 
ment is, that the change does mean something. 
The two conceptions, of infinite duration and in- 
definite duration, are not the same to the common 
sense of men. When affirmed of retributive woe, 
the change from endlessness to indefiniteness does 
diminish the fearful intensity of the truth. It in- 
troduces untold possibilities of relief. It does lift 
off that which, to the majority of minds, is the 
chief weight, from the intolerable burden of the 
" wrath of God." This is the reason why our af- 
frighted and tortured sensibilities shrink from the 
ancient faith, and seek this cloud-land. It is be- 
cause here eternity is veiled by something which 
is less than eternity. This does encroach upon the 
very substance of the faith. Otherwise, men 
would not crave it, as they do, in their search after 
God's meaning. 

3. The present trend of inquiry on the subject 
gives special prominence to another element in the 
doctrine of retribution. It is that of the decision 
of the retributive destiny by the experience of the 
present life. On this point, also, it will not do for 
a religious teacher to say, " I do not know." He 
ought to know. Inspired instructors assume that 
they do know. If any one thing is made clear by 
the whole drift and structure of revelation, it is 
this, that probation begins and ends with this life. 
Our Lord's teachings suggest neither doubt of 



The Biblical Doctrine of Retribution. 63 

this fact nor exception to it. Apostolic instruc- 
tions suggest neither. This is not a subject on 
which it is reasonable to believe that a revelation 
from heaven has taught nothing. The when and 
the where of probation enter into the very fact of 
probation. The Scriptures furnish as much evi- 
dence that our probation began in a former world, 
as that it will be continued or supplemented in 
a world to come. Regenerate character started 
into being here may be improved, developed, fin- 
ished, in a future life which is not the perfected 
heavenly life. But this is education, and educa- 
tion is not probation. It is probation which de- 
termines the great moral distinction of character 
as right or wrong ; and this the Bible everywhere 
assumes to be the work of one life and one only. 
On the deeds done in the body the retributive ex- 
perience depends. 

Nor is it safe to say that this is not an essential 
truth. What truth can be, in some relations of 
it, more essential? Is it non-essential to a dying 
man whether or not he is about to enter another 
world of probationary opportunity? To a mind 
awakened to the realities of eternity, and asking, 
" What must I do to be saved ? " is it of no moment 
that all chances of salvation end here ? Could a 
revival of religion ever have existed, if the pulpit 
had been shorn of this element of its power ? 
Could St. Paul have preached the gospel success- 
fully without it ? Look at its bearing on the whole 
theory of missions to the heathen. Would it not 



64 My Portfolio. 

seem to many minds to be a work of dubious be- 
nevolence to impose on heathen tribes the intense 
tests of character which Christianity creates, if 
without them the heathen soul might find its pro- 
bation in another world ? When Alexander Duff 
fired the heart of Scotland on the subject of mis- 
sions to India, the new departure was opposed by 
the " Moderates " in the General Assembly, as 
" tending to disturb the moral chances of happy 
and contented Pagans." One part of the argu- 
ment was, that, as they had little chance here, they 
might, if they were let alone, have another else- 
where. The sequence is inevitable from even the 
conjecture of probation in another world : " If 
another, surely a better world than this ; let us 
wait for it ! " So the mind instinctively reasons. 
The validity of these views is not affected un- 
favorably by the fact that the Scriptures nowhere 
expressly affirm the non-existence of probation in 
the life to come. It is not the usage of inspiration 
to affirm negatives. Besides, the absence of such 
affirmation is rather a sign of the confidence of 
the inspired mind in the truth concerned. There 
is a class of truths, of which the presumptive and 
implied evidences are so conclusive, that to load 
them down with further proof would weaken 
them. Of one such truth our Lord said, " If it 
were not so, I would have told you." So of the 
doctrine now before us : if it were not true that 
probation is limited to this mundane life, a revela- 
tion from God would surely have told us. On 



The Biblical Doctrine of Retribution. 65 

such a point we need to know the truth and the 
whole truth. A message from heaven would have 
been singularly defective and delusive, if it had 
professed to teach us the way of salvation, and yet 
had been so framed as to leave such a truth in 
doubt. The assumptions and implications of the 
Bible, all pointing one way, leave us not a shadow 
of a reason for even the conjecture of a doubt. 

The three elements of the doctrine of retribu- 
tion here affirmed can not, then, be safely held in 
abeyance by a Christian preacher. Commonly it 
is true that a conscientious inquirer believes more 
than he thinks he does. He may tread reverently 
along the heights and in the depths of the truth 
of God. For this he should not be suspected of 
unbelief, though his reverent spirit may express 
itself in the forms of doubt. But, when it comes 
to such solid essentials of truth as those here con- 
sidered, doubt ceases to be pertinent. One who 
would assume the office of a preacher, and who 
seeks, therefore, the indorsement of the Church, 
should know what he knows. He should be able to 
declare it with full and bold assertion. One posi- 
tive word is worth a dozen points of interrogation. 



TIL 

THE PUEITAN THEOKY OF AMUSEMENTS. 

The Christian theory of amusements is under- 
going revision. In the process, the Puritan char- 
acter is liable to suffer some foreshortening. A 
few historic facts may help to keep it in its true 
perspective. 

1. One is the fact that the Puritan's theory of 
amusements was interwoven with his struggle for 
religious liberty. The famous " Book of Sports " 
was one of his crying grievances. No matter 
what was the character of such a book in itself 
considered, be it as harmless as a baby's rattle, 
it was an offense to the Puritans as an interfer- 
ence of the government with their religious con- 
victions and the instructions of their religious 
teachers. 

Human nature does not vary much under such 
grievances. We all resent the interloping of the 
State in religious matters, unless the State plants 
itself on "the right side." The more petty the 
object, the more fierce the resistance. So thought 
the Puritans. It was an offense to them that the 
king should interfere at all on such a matter. 

66 



The Puritan Theory of Amusements. 67 

Still more did they object to being denounced as 
recusants, because they would not dance around 
a Maypole. When did ever a Christian govern- 
ment, on such a subject, refuse to let alone the 
consciences of full-grown matrons and bearded 
men? 

Under such irritation it was inevitable that the 
Puritan conscience should grow fanatical. Con- 
science is elastic in more ways than one. Put it 
under pressure of law repellent to its convictions, 
and it will bulge into moral tumors. Tell me that 
I must do a thing of which my conscience doubts, 
and conscience vaults over instantly into rebel- 
lion. I find a score of reasons against that thing, 
which I never thought of before. A hundred 
texts begin to bombard it, which were Quaker 
guns till now. 

Such is human nature. The Puritans did not 
rise above manhood. They reasoned and believed 
and acted, probably about as well as you or I 
should do if the governor of the Commonwealth 
should issue a proclamation enjoining it upon our 
clergy, on pain of imprisonment, to invite and 
urge us to attend an exhibition of Punch and 
Judy on Boston Common. 

2. The Puritan theory of amusements was also, 
by stress of similar circumstances, wrought into 
their theory of the Lord's Day. 

The Puritans were Christians of the Hebrew 
type. Right or wrong, they held to the Jewish 
ideal of the sabbath. They read it in the word of 



68 My Portfolio. 

God ; and to read was to believe. The spiritual 
and devotional spectacle of a Parisian or a Roman 
Sunday did not convince them. They did not see 
how much more intelligent and pure and devout 
such a Sunday would make a Christian people ! 

In those days German beer-gardens were not. 
The Puritans did not hanker after Spanish bull- 
fights. Yet they must do something on Sunday ; 
and they had no chance to see how much more 
refining and sanctifying such recreations are to 
the character of a people than the services of 
Christian churches ! Even the Maypole and the 
Morris dance did not satisfy them as means of 
grace. So, for the want of something better, they 
took to the churches. 

Right or wrong, I repeat, they preferred to bull- 
fights and bear-baitings and May-games the old 
Mosaic sabbath, and the psalms and hymns which 
had rung through a thousand years of Christian 
song. Yet the laws of the realm struck right 
across their conscience in this thing. Grave states- 
men and reverend bishops advised, and the king 
decreed, that the odious " Book of Sports " should 
be announced to his subjects from every pulpit in 
the kingdom on Sunday, and the sports therein 
recorded should be practiced in the afternoon, after 
the church service. 

How reasonable would anybody's theory of 
amusements be likely to be, if back of it, and 
inextricably intertwined with it, there lay such a 
flagrant outrage upon religious liberty and the 



The Puritan Theory of Amusements. 69 

sense of religious propriety ? The surest way to 
set a man's conscience to inventing reasons against 
a harmless thing is to back it up by tyrannical 
auxiliaries. Under such friction, conscience de 
velops a sharp polarity. Tell me that I must, on 
pain of the pillory, invite the Park-street Church 
of Boston to unite with me in a game of football 
on Sunday afternoon, at four o'clock, and exhila- 
rating to the religious emotions as that game may 
be for aught that I know, the chances are ten to 
one, that, within a week, my conscience will declare 
with the solemnity of a revelation from heaven, 
that football is a sin. That is human nature. The 
Puritans were men. 

How often would the Eev. Dr. Manning and the 
Rev. Phillips Brooks read a proclamation from 
the governor, inviting their congregations, after 
the sacrament of the Lord's Supper on a Sunday 
afternoon, to go out and dance around a pole on 
Beacon Hill? Would not their congregations be 
likely to hear some " godly and painful sermons," 
as the Puritan critics used to describe good preach- 
ing, on the claims of the dance upon a Christian 
people ? Would not hearers be apt to follow up 
the painstaking blast of the preacher by some- 
thing more substantial than a sermon ? I would 
not insure the conscience of St. Paul against 
some morbid extremes of faith, if hawked at by 
such beaks of petty tyranny. 

3. The Puritan theory of amusements was iden- 
tified with what they believed to be the Christian 



70 My Portfolio. 

theory of life. They never thought of the thing 
as apart by itself. Whether dancing was a sin, 
or card-playing was a sin, or play-going was a sin, 
per se, they cared not one whit. They had little 
to say or do about sins per se. They were the 
most practical men that ever lived. They were 
a race of Benjamin Franklins. They sifted every 
thing as a matter of real life. They did this in 
dead earnest. 

This question of amusements, therefore, was to 
them a representative question, in which was in- 
volved the whole spirit of Christian living. They 
brought to its discussion the whole force of their 
intense religious nature. In their very make they 
were intense men. They were anthracite on fire. 
Without flame or crackle or smoke, theirs was 
solid heat, burning stilly day and night. Such 
intensity of moral being they brought to all ques- 
tions of practical life. 

Such men felt no need of amusements. How 
could they? They were not born, as sopie men 
appear to be, at hap-hazard, without an aim in 
living, and with no power to create one. Their 
happiness did not depend on cat's-cradle and push- 
pin. They did not know the meaning of the word 
" ennui." They came into this world as apostles. 
They came because they were sent. The echo of 
the voice which created them always sounded in 
their ears, and heralded their steps. Theirs was a 
great mission. Their souls were straitened till it 
was accomplished. When invited, urged, bribed, 



The Puritan Theory of Amusements. 71 

cajoled, commanded, threatened, browbeaten, to 
induce them to dance around a Maypole on the 
village green, they calmly said, " Wist ye not that 
I must be about my Father's business?" 

That which seemed to weaker natures a harm- 
less or needful recreation seemed to them frivolity. 
When charged with excessive precision, said one 
of them for answer, " I have a precise God to deal 
with." They saw no record that Christ danced 
around poles, or amused himself with a jack-of- 
spades, or laughed at clowns and harlequins, or 
figured at masquerade balls. As they read his 
life, they saw him seeking relief from life's burdens 
in the companionship of brothers and sisters, in 
the homes of Bethany, in the society of angels, 
in communion with God. They saw that to him 
midnight prayer took the place of midnight revels. 
They honestly tried to live as Christ lived. Why 
should they not? 

Right or wrong, they believed this to be the 
true theory of life ; and, what is more, they in 
good measure lived it. They enjoyed it. As a 
class, they were the happiest of mortals. If ever 
in this world men enjoyed life, they did, whenever 
tyranny would let them alone. And, when it 
would not, they entertained each other with songs 
in prisons, and broke out with doxologies at the 
stake. 

It may be well enough to revise their theory of 
amusements for later times and new generations. 
The constitutions of States rarely last a century 



72 My Portfolio. 

without change : still less should a popular theory 
of recreations. We may wisely let up somewhat 
of the Puritan pressure upon the modern con- 
science. We may bid God-speed to anybody who 
thinks he can improve in this respect the usages 
of a Christian people. By all means, let us give 
him a hearing. Specially may we extend the law 
of Christian liberty in this thing. We may trust- 
fully leave it to every man's conscience to say 
what recreations, in themselves innocent (as almost 
all recreations are), will be a help to him in godly 
living. 

But, after all, who can fail to see that the spirit 
of the Puritans on this subject was the Christian 
spirit ? Who can help seeing that improvement, 
if it comes, must come from the same spirit? 
Theirs was the spirit of a live conscience. It was 
the spirit of humble inquiry : it sought wisdom 
from God. It was the conservative spirit : it 
leaned to the safe side of moral questions. It 
was the profound spirit : it sought happiness in 
duties, rather than in rights. 

It is very easy to fling at the Puritans in this 
matter, but it is very weak. Every dog must have 
his bay at the moon, but healthy men sleep 
through it. So disparagement of the Puritans 
does not disturb sound thinkers. The world has 
outlived the wit of it. The libel of the " Blue 
Laws" has ceased to be amusing. If we could 
stay long enough to answer such disparagement, 
our answer would be to point to the men whom 



The Puritan Theory of Amusements. 73 

the Puritan theories of life created. Not till the 
improved theories give us better men and better 
women, can we wisely believe that they are im- 
provements. Not till children trained under such 
improvements turn out to be more Christlike men 
and women, more prayerful, more self-denying, 
more useful, happier, too, in the profound sense 
of spiritual joy, can we safely admit that their 
fathers are wiser than our fathers. For that proof 
the world must wait a while, — must wait long 
enough for us to do some things which the world 
is in more pressing need of than of an increase of 
amusements and of idle time. 



YIIL 

THE OHKISTIAH THEOEY OF AMUSEMENTS. 

Certain incidental principles are essential to a 
working theory. 

1. It must be a theory which can be made to 
seem reasonable to youthful inquiry. 

There is a period of transition from youth to 
manhood, in which authority must take reason 
into partnership. That is the period at which the 
question of amusements is the most practical and 
yet most critical. Fathers and mothers find that 
their parental authority is no adequate answer to 
filial questionings. Youth investigates de novo the 
family traditions. The ethics of the fathers un- 
dergo revision. The query often sends a Christian 
parent to his closet, How shall the usage of a 
Christian family hold its own against the usage of 
the world? 

At that period, the Christian use or disuse of 
amusements must be sustained by reasons which 
are reasons. They must be obvious and conclu- 
sive. So far as they are prohibitory, they must 
leave no open questions ; still less must they be 
involved in refinements of casuistry. 

74 



The Christian Theory of Amusements. 75 

To illustrate by a case in point. Are not 
Christian fathers often sensible, in their argument 
with growing sons, that the traditionary objections 
to card-playing are not conclusive ? Does not the 
stereotyped argument in the negative seem weak 
to ingenuous minds? Are not the distinctions 
often made between that and other games falla- 
cious? I suspect that there is not a little of 
secret practice of forbidden games, not because of 
willful sin, but by reason of unsatisfactory argu- 
ment against them. We have not carried the 
conscience of our sons and daughters with us, 
because we have not carried their common sense. 

This is an evil under the sun. When a time- 
honored feature of Christian practice is thus non- 
suited in the court of youthful investigation, it 
needs to be reconsidered. Either the argument 
for it must be re-enforced, or its claims should 
be abandoned. Better the surrender than the 
enforcement by conservative authority alone. 

2. We must have a theory of amusements which 
requires no concealments in our practice. 

If any weakness is more fatal than another to a 
principle of morals, it is the admission of secret 
practices under it. Right has no love for the 
dark. Light is sown for the righteous. That I 
may indulge myself in amusements behind lock 
and key which I may not enjoy with open win- 
dows ; that I may do in a strange city that which 
I must not do in my home ; that I may seek enter- 
tainments privately to which I would not invite 



76 My Portfolio. 

my wife and daughter ; that I may attend recrea- 
tions in Naples which I denounce in New York ; 
that I may do where I am known only as a lay- 
man what I must not do where I am known as a 
clergyman ; or that I may do as a man what I 
must not do as a churchman, — all these things 
are offenses to sound morals. 

That any theory of amusements requires or 
admits of such secret licenses as these is 'prima 
facie evidence against it. Blunt men of the world 
will denounce such ethics as the ethics of a sneak. 
If any thing will bear the light in this world, it is 
Christian living. That needs no apologies, and 
seeks no cover. The very meanest form of phari- 
saism is that which is ascetic in public and epi- 
curean in private. The very worst use a man 
can make of his conscience is to lay prohibitory 
restrictions on other men which he declines to 
accept himself. Our Saviour gave a title to such 
men which is akin to the rattlesnake. 

Yet is not Christian example on the subject of 
amusements often fatally invalidated by inconsis- 
tencies of this kind ? The most senseless advice 
I ever heard of was that given by a Christian 
father to his son : " I do not say pro or con about 
card-playing, but it must not be practiced in my 
house." It is not surprising that that boy has 
gone to sea. 

A sermon has been preached against the thea- 
ters of New York, which the preacher could not 
have known enough to deliver if he had not at- 



The Christian Theory of Amusements. 77 

tended the theaters of London. The usefulness 
of such sermons was never worth their cost. In 
Christian living we must first, and above all things 
else, be men. We must live above ground, and 
not burrow. 

3. We must have a theory which admits of no 
suspense of conscience in practice ; that is to 
say, positive decisions of conscience must cover 
the whole ground of our practice. It is a fatal 
weakness in any theory of morals, if it leaves con- 
duct to swing loose in some things for the want 
of an opinion. To be obliged to say, " I do not 
know," when my conduct is all the while assum- 
ing that I ought to know, is a fraud upon princi- 
ple as well as upon example. No man's example 
can have authority, because no man's principle 
deserves it, if it is thus cramped in its range by 
suspense of conscience. 

Yet is not this the weak point in the practice of 
some Christians respecting amusements ? We do 
not mean to be disloyal to conscience ; but certain 
indulgences we do not bring into the court of 
conscience, or, if we do, we have never pressed 
for a verdict. We therefore do things on which 
we have no theory of right and wrong. It is much 
easier to obey a public opinion than it is to create 
one. This we do, when we accept worldly usage 
as our law with a silent conscience. The rudder 
swings loose, and the ship drifts. 

Such was not the way of Christ. When did he 
ever act with a speechless conscience ? What one 



78 My Portfolio. 

thing did he ever do on which he had no opinion, 
and could give no reason? When did he ever 
permit the world's usage to become a law to him, 
for the want of a conscience quick and positive ? 
" The world was not his friend, nor the world's 
law." Neither are they ours. He never yielded 
to it a matter of conscience by default. Why 
should we ? 

4. We must have a theory, which, in its practi- 
cal working, will not alienate from us the sympa- 
thies of the great majority of God's people. 

The Christian Church being what it is, no man, 
on any question of practical morals, can afford 
to stand alone. This is specially true respecting 
things of secondary importance, like the amuse- 
ments of a people. No man can for such a cause 
isolate himself from the great body of spiritual 
Christians, without loss. If we achieve all that 
we claim, we get but a minor good : if we sacrifice 
to it our affiliation with God's people, or theirs 
with us, we suffer an immeasurable evil. 

Oblivion of this truth is apparent, often, in the 
spirit in which the Christian law of amusements 
is discussed. It is debated too warmly as a ques- 
tion of individual liberty. But as such is it worth 
debating? Liberty in such matters is not worth 
its cost, if we gain it at the expense of Christian 
fellowship. 

There is more than loss of influence in such 
isolation : there is loss of certain fine elements of 
character which no man or woman should be will- 



The Christian Theory of Amusements. 79 

ing to part with. There is loss of a wise Chris- 
tian modesty. It is possible, but not probable, 
that the individual is right in his dissent from the 
instinct of the Christian Church. He may be in- 
spired above his peers, but such is not the usual 
method of divine revelations. His self-conceit 
feeds upon his modesty, if he believes himself thus 
exalted. 

There is a loss of fraternal affection also. It is 
a selfish thing in me to stand up against the cur- 
rent of Christian feeling for my right to attend a 
theater or a masquerade. My combative nature 
ought not to be roused against good men and 
praying women for a mask and a farce. They can 
afford it ; but can I? Sooner or later I must come 
to myself, and grieve over my irreparable loss. 

Is there not food for reflection in this view, 
which a certain class of Christians need for their 
own healthy digestion of the Christian law of 
recreations ? 



IX. 

IS CAED-PLAYING A CHRISTIAN AMUSEMENT? 

Is it right ? Is it expedient ? Something must 
in fairness be conceded to the affirmative. It 
must be admitted, so far as Puritan authority- 
bears upon the question, that the Puritan casuis- 
try was infected with Judaism, to the detriment of 
Christian liberty, in making religion consist so 
largely as it did in obedience to prohibitions. Our 
Puritan fathers were not emancipated to the ex- 
tent of apostolic liberty from the judaizing spirit. 
That a change is in progress in Christian senti- 
ment on the subject can not be denied. 

The advocates of Christian card-playing are cor- 
rect, also, in claiming that the distinction which 
it has been common to make between games with 
cards and other games of chance is fallacious. 
Any father who has attempted to argue with a 
quick-witted son in college on that theory must 
have felt misgivings, to say the least, as to the 
soundness of his reasoning. For one, I must give 
it up. The principle that it is a sin to make a 
frivolous appeal to Providence by the throw of 
dice is a fair subject of debate. But, if claimed 

80 



Is Card-Playing a Christian Amusement? 81 

in one game, it must be conceded in all. On that 
principle, to toss up a penny is a sin. 

The argument from association fares scarcely- 
better against the modern card-playing for amuse- 
ment. " Cards are the instruments of the gam- 
bling-hell. Touch not a thing so saturated with 
the fumes of the pit." The Puritans made much 
of this. In later times it has not been easy to 
answer it with a Christian conscience. It was 
one of the singular anomalies in casuistry, that 
the very same public opinion which authorized 
the Rev. Dr. Nott, sixty years ago, to obtain a 
half-million of dollars for Union College by a lot- 
tery, upheld laws forbidding card-playing. 

But now we are told by those who are learned 
in the devices of Satan, that cards have ceased to 
occupy that guilty pre-eminence ; that whist es- 
pecially is rarely used by gamesters; that their 
vice has monopolized the roulette-table, the game 
of billiards, and even the old-fashioned children's 
game of dominos, which in our childhood we 
were taught to consider as innocent as cherry- 
stones. The argument from ungodly association, 
therefore, if pleaded, must expel dominos from 
our nurseries, rather than cards from our parlors. 

It must, in fairness, be conceded, also, that 
games of chance, cards included, may be inno- 
cently used as a sanitary expedient. In asylums 
for the insane they are relied upon as among 
the staple means of occupying lightly a diseased 
brain. One excellent officer of a church within 



82 My Portfolio. 

my knowledge died insane, whose reason and life 
might, in the judgment of his physicians, perhaps 
have been saved, if his conscience had permitted 
him to while away the weary hours of convales- 
cence with whist and backgammon. 

The philosophy of the sanitary effect of games 
of chance is not obscure. The disease of a con- 
gested brain is a deluge of thinking. Serious 
thinking is logic. Its continuity is its bane. It 
is a chain of iron. The sleepless spirit falls under 
a bondage to it more bitter than fetters to hand 
or foot. The train of thought, as we call it, be- 
comes to the burning brain worse than the folds 
of the serpents to the limbs of Laocoon. Power 
of will can not break it. Sleep becomes impossible. 
The victim is in the condition of the Chinese 
criminal, doomed to the torture of enforced in- 
somnia by the beating of a bell thrown over his 
head, till raving mania ends the scene. Any 
thing gives hope which can break up logical con- 
tinuity of brain-work. This the game of chance 
will often do ; and, the more abundant the element 
of chance, the better. The fortuitous complica- 
tions of whist reduce brain-&w& to brain-pZay ; 
and that is just what the raging nervous centers 
crave. Hence the universal use of chance-games 
in insane-asylums. 

Why may they not be as useful in some Chris- 
tian homes ? Two Christian friends once met at 
a sanitarium. Both were suffering from over- 
worked brains. Both were threatened with in- 



Is Card-Playing a Christian Amusement? 83 

sanity. One of them has since died of the disease 
which then oppressed him. Both had been 
directed by their physicians to relieve the tedium 
of their useless hours by whist. They debated 
the matter as friends of Christ, and members of 
Christ's church. Deliberately and prayerfully 
they revived the little they had known of the 
game in their youth, and spent many evenings in 
that amusement. They did it without a ripple of 
condemning conscience. They used to go from 
the weekly prayer-meeting under the same roof, 
to the private room of one or the other, and played 
whist an hour or two before retiring for the night. 
It was their most effective and harmless soporific. 
Was whist, under those conditions, a sin ? 

The apology for card-playing is fairly entitled 
to whatever of support it may derive from these 
concessions, and some others of less moment. 
Two other considerations, however, it seems to 
me, should, except in cases of mental disease or 
its premonitions, decide Christian practice in the 
negative. 

One of these is the deference which is due 
to the Christian judgment of a very large and emi- 
nently spiritual portion of the Christian Church. 
It is a serious thing to dissent from the church of 
Christ upon any matter of importance affecting 
public morals. No reverent and thoughtful Chris- 
tian will do it heedlessly or defiantly. There is a 
religious Bohemianism which prides itself on its 
flings of dissent at the " bigotry " and the " nar- 



84 My Portfolio. 

rowness" of the Church, which is not worthy 
either of a Christian, or a man. It is below the 
respect of either. Even if the abstract liberty be 
with the individual, the law of Christian fellow- 
ship demands the waiving of an individual right 
in things non-essential, as all mere amusements 
are, if the overwhelming voice of the Christian 
body be against it. 

How, then, stands the judgment of the Church 
upon the question in hand ? In the Catholic and 
Episcopal, and perhaps Lutheran churches, the 
innocence of this amusement is not often ques- 
tioned. In considerable fragments of the Presby- 
terian, the Reformed, and the Congregational 
churches, the practice of it has of late years been 
gaining ground. 

But, with these exceptions, it must be said that 
the voice of the great bulk of Evangelical churches 
is at present in the negative. In the rural 
churches especially, the sentiment of the olden 
time remains intact. A bishop of the Methodist 
Church has recently testified that that branch of 
the Church is almost a unit against card-playing. 
Probably the same is true, outside of cities cer- 
tainly, of the Baptist Church. A large majority 
of the Presbyterian, the Reformed, and the Con- 
gregational churches, also, hold fast the traditions 
of the fathers. 

This makes up a volume of weighty testimony. 
The fact is noteworthy, that it is emphasized in 
times of religious revival. Right or wrong in 



Is Card-Playing a Christian Amusement? 85 

theory, it deserves deference in practice. Any 
man will respect it who retains enough of Chris- 
tian dignity to respect any thing which outweighs 
his own opinion. True, the degree of deserved 
deference to the Christian judgment of others is 
a variable quantity. When a single, and we must 
think an idle, Methodist conference in Ohio pro- 
nounces by solemn vote against the rural game of 
croquet, intelligent Christian opinion everywhere 
else reasonably demurs. Such a vote is provincial. 
It carries with it none of the authority of the 
Church Universal. 

When the revered Dr. Finney of Oberlin sol- 
emnly and publicly reproves the mirth of the hard- 
worked clergy of the Congregational Church, 
assembled for an hour's recreation at a banquet in 
Brooklyn, we reasonably withstand our reverend 
father to his face : " No, sir : in this thing you are 
ascetic and monastic. ' The Son of man came eat- 
ing and drinking, and ye say he hath a devil.' ' 

When a bowling-alley was first appended to the 
gymnasium of the Andover Seminary, I received a 
long and very solemn letter of remonstrance from 
an excellent Christian woman. She probably died 
in the belief that the Spirit of God departed from 
Andover at the advent of that snare of Satan. 
The reverend and honorable Board of Trustees did 
not revoke their action at such a call. What 
would my friend have said to the profligacy of 
the trustees of Princeton College in introducing 
a billiard-table ? 



86 My Portfolio. 

These cases are clear. But the case is very 
different with the judgment of an overwhelming 
majority of the Evangelical Church on a subject 
on which, till recent years, the Evangelical body 
was almost unanimous in the same direction. 
Such a witness is worthy of respect. Such a 
body of believers have a right to ask that we 
should not so practice our individual liberty as to 
wound their feelings by doing that which is only 
an amusement to us, but which to them seems an 
infliction of a wound upon the Lord himself. A 
believer who has a tender sense of Christian fel- 
lowship, it should seem, would not do that thing. 
Nevertheless, to the Master he standeth or falleth, 
not to you or me. 

The other consideration is that of the danger of 
the example to those to whose consciences games 
of chance are not matters of indifference. Many 
such there are, the children of Christian families, 
who have been trained in the earlier school of 
casuistry on the subject. In their present state of 
religious culture they can not play a game of cards 
innocently. Multitudes there are, also, of the 
world outside, whose inherited conscience on the 
subject condemns this amusement, even though 
they practice it. To them it is a symbol of un- 
godliness and a badge of Satan. They feel, it to 
be unworthy of one making profession of Christ. 
It is one of the snares of the world, which, if 
they should become Christians, they would feel 
bound in conscience to put away. They may join 



Is Card-Playing a Christian Amusement? 87 

a Christian card-player to his face, and berate him 
roundly as a hypocrite behind his back. From no 
tribunal do professing Christians receive severer 
judgment than from those with whom they unite 
in pleasures which the conscience of the world 
condemns. 

Here applies St. Paul's principle respecting the 
meats offered to idols: "Take heed, lest this 
liberty of yours become a stumbling-block. If 
any see thee, shall not the conscience of him be 
emboldened? Through thy knowledge shall the 
weak brother perish for whom Christ died? If 
meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no 
meat while the world standeth." 

Is not this good sense, as well as sound Chris- 
tianity ? And is it not pat to the purpose ? Free 
as we may feel in individual conscience, and much 
as we may desire that all should come into our 
Christian liberty in this thing, yet is it worth to 
us the sacrifice of one iota of Christian fellowship? 
Still more, is it worth to us the imperiling of an 
unsaved brother's soul ? Abstinence seems in this 
thing, as in reference to the drinking customs of 
society, to be the true law of Christian fraternity 
and of common philanthropy. 



X. 

THE QUESTION OF SUNDAY OAES. 

Rev. Dr. Humphrey, when president of Am- 
herst College, used to preach frequently in the 
adjoining towns. To do this, he often crossed the 
Connecticut River on Sunday morning in a ferry- 
boat, and returned by the same conveyance in the 
evening. In accordance with the pious usage of 
those times, he endeavored to " improve his oppor- 
tunities," in imitation of Him who sat and talked 
by the well of Samaria. He unexpectedly met 
his match one morning in the quick-witted ferry- 
man. "Oh, yes!" said the latter, "I want to 
save my soul. I believe all you say; but the 
fact is, I have no time for such things. On week- 
days I have to work my farm while the boy works 
the ferry, till, when the nights come, I am too 
sleepy to know whether I have a soul. Then, 
when Sunday comes, I have to be here to carry 
you parsons across the river. I haven't had a 
passenger this morning, except parsons." So, in 
substance, the story ran, as Dr. Humphrey related 
it to a friend. He went home and revised his 
observance of the Lord's Day, and the ferryman 
lost a Sunday customer. 



The Question of Sunday Cars. 89 

We pass on about thirty years, and a tall, grave 
man, over sixty years of age, whose look reminds 
one of " that disciple whom Jesus loved," is seen 
walking from the west bank of the River Schuyl- 
kill at Philadelphia, on a Sunday morning, and 
after preaching twice, and presiding at a third ser- 
vice in the evening, walking back to his country- 
home, while horse-cars, a score or more, are pass- 
ing him back and forth. The distance is over 
three miles each way. It is the Rev. Albert 
Barnes, who thus endeavors to honor his faith in 
the Christian sabbath, which he devoutly believes 
to be violated by the running of the street-cars on 
that day. He has lately led his brethren and the 
good people of Philadelphia in a protest against 
the innovation, and his Sunday walks are his indi- 
vidual tribute to the same end. 

We pass on fifteen years more. The scene is 
shifted, we will suppose, to an academic town not 
a thousand miles from either the Connecticut or 
the Schuylkill River. The steam-cars run to and 
from the neighboring metropolis, not as fre- 
quently, but as regularly, on the Lord's Day as 
on any other. Conductors, brakemen, engineers, 
oilmen, and other adjuncts of a railway train, — 
and we are told that a well-manned train requires 
the service, on the average, of about twenty men, 
— are employed as on a week-day. They know 
no difference between secular and holy time. Life 
to them is one long treadmill of secularities. If 
they should chance to be moved, by a tract given 



90 My Portfolio. 

to them by a Sunday traveler, to petition that 
their right to the Lord's Day and its refreshing 
liberties should be restored to them, they would 
probably be told that railway trains can not run 
on scruples ; that they require a steel conscience 
as well as steel rails ; and that, if the petitioners 
do not think so, their services are no longer 
wanted. A hundred hungry men to each one 
of them stand ready to take their places. Wife 
and children at home must have bread ; and, if the 
petitioners try to reason the matter with their 
superiors, they probably end with pocketing their 
wages — and their scruples. The train runs as 
before, and twenty men have no sabbath ; and the 
consciences of twenty men are indurated, it may 
be, for a lifetime. 

On the line of that railroad some two or three 
hundred preachers, more or less, live ; and many 
of them, not a large minority perhaps, but an 
increasing one, use the cars as freely on Sunday 
as on Monday. Anomalies easily grow to usages 
in such things. Distance appears to have little 
concern with the license which these itinerant 
ministers take with sacred time. They ride any 
distance which can be traveled in season for the 
morning service, and nobody audibly questions 
it. Nevertheless, it is questioned. The traveling 
ministers on the Lord's Day are surrounded by a 
great cloud of witnesses in more worlds than one. 
Approving angels, we trust, hear their faithful 
sermons and devout intercessions, — approving, 



The Question of Sunday Cars. 91 

that is, the sermon and the prayer ; but three or 
four hundred young students in the academic town 
listen also, thinking, the while, not so much of 
prayer and sermon as of that which went before. 
They ask each other, and ask their instructors, 
"is it right for these ministers to go and come in 
the Sunday trains? If right for them, why not 
for us ? " Next Sunday they ask leave to go to 
Boston to attend a " sacred concert " on the Com- 
mon, — one of the improvements of these latter 
days for the spiritual culture of that goodly city 
and its suburbs. And when they receive a nega- 
tive, and are required to attend church and hear 
the ministers instead, they do not quite see the 
reasons of things. Is anybody else wiser? 

Dr. Humphrey, Mr. Barnes, and these later itin- 
erant divines, have all, doubtless, agreed in one 
thing. They have all lauded with unmeasured 
respect that act of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 
1620, in which they bore witness to their rever- 
ence for the Christian sabbath by remaining, with 
their sick ones and little children, another day in 
the cabins of their leaky ship, after a tedious and 
unhealthy passage, that they might not use unwor- 
thily the Lord's time. 

Which of these reverend, and, we would will- 
ingly believe, equally conscientious men, have been 
right about this thing? If the query admits of 
doubt, which have chosen the safer side ? Have 
the Pilgrims probably discovered, in a more tonic 
atmosphere than that of Plymouth Bay, that they 



92 My Portfolio. 

bore ascetic penance in "The Mayflower" and 
"The Speedwell" for a sickly scruple? In the 
deed which we recall so reverently on Forefathers' 
Day, was their tribute to history to the end of 
time, only a freak of superstition, — the thing, 
which, above all others, they abhorred ? Did Dr. 
Humphrey and Mr. Barnes, in their modest imita- 
tion of the fathers, expose to the world's contempt 
the fussiness of a pettifogging conscience ? Ought 
we to place all these reverend men, in our esti- 
mate of character, by the side of George Fox, 
in his praying over the cut of his Quaker coat 
and the width of the rim of his Quaker hat ? If 
so, it is time that we all see it thus, and see the 
reason why. Such feeble brethren as Dr. Hum- 
phrey and Mr. Barnes let us shield in compassion- 
ate silence. On Forefathers' Day let us frankly 
place the scrupulous delay of the landing at 
Plymouth alongside of Tower Hill in Salem. Let 
us teach our children that both represent obsolete 
blunders of a conscience not illumined by the 
dawn of these better days. Then, for ourselves, 
let us endeavor to mount the spiritual heights of 
the "sacred concerts" on Boston Common, in 
which the Metropolitan Band shall lead our de- 
votions in (we quote from the advertisements) 
the "concert-waltzes of Strauss," and "La Som- 
nambula of Cavallini." 

An eminent Boston merchant, a man not given 
to narrow Sabbatarianism, puts this whole ques- 
tion of the observance of the Lord's Day in a 



The . Question of Sunday Cars. 93 

nutshell, in words which suburban ministers may 
wisely take in admonition to themselves. He 
says, in a letter which lies before me, " The wedge 
once entered, there is no resisting its progress. 
We bid fair to have a Parisian sabbath here before 
long, unless Christian people are willing to deny 
themselves, and do nothing which may give their 
neighbor an excuse for taking another step." The 
suburbans of a large city are, to a great extent, 
responsible for its moral decline. They help to 
fill its theaters; they patronize its "sacred con- 
certs," which are a burlesque on the name; they 
fill large spaces in its Sunday trains. Cut off the 
suburban patronage, and could one of these sources 
of detriment to public morals be supported? 
Doubtful. 



XL 

WOMAN-SUFFRAGE AS JUDGED BT THE WORKING 
OF NEGRO-SUFFRAGE 

A false principle wrought into real life always 
works itself out in disaster. Nemesis watches it. 
Its malign nature will out relentlessly. Its work- 
ing is like that of demoniacal possession : the dis- 
possession comes with outcry and convulsions. 

Such is the naked fact in the issue of our ex- 
periment in giving the ballot to the negro of the 
plantation. We put the most delicate blossom of 
civilization into the hands of a herd of ignorance 
and brutishness. We uplifted men to the ulti- 
mate height of republican freedom, whose donkeys 
knew nearly as much of its responsibilities as they 
did. We drew from the rice-fields to the polls 
men who in some instances deposited there circus- 
bills, hotel dinner-bills, and copies of the Lord's 
Prayer. We threw open halls of legislation which 
the finished culture of the land had graced, to 
men who not only could neither read nor write, 
but whose guffaws in derision of parliamentary 
order, as they sat with feet higher than their 
heads, betrayed scarcely more of intelligence than 

94 



Woman-Suffrage judged by Negro-Suffrage. 95 

the bray of an ass. The Rhetts and Legares, and 
Hamptons and Calhouns of a great State, have 
been succeeded in part by Sambo and Pompey, 
and Caesar and Jerusalem. 

The issue, to the most sanguine believers in the 
necessity of the experiment, must seem to be a 
dead failure. Not only has it breeded bad legis- 
lation, and repudiated debts, but the fundamental 
law of representative government — that by which 
majorities rule — has been abrogated by force. 
The process has been so revolutionary, that we 
have had to coin a new word to express it. " Bull- 
doze " will live long in our language in token of 
the wretched business. 

Political partisans may gloss it over as they 
please ; yet few non-partisans in the land doubt 
that minorities rule to-day in South Carolina and 
Louisiana, and probably in three other Southern 
States. Govs. Chamberlain and Packard are de 
jure chief magistrates of their respective Com- 
monwealths. They have the sympathy of thou- 
sands who feel compelled, by a necessity which 
knows not law, to support the policy which dis- 
owns them. Their rivals govern only by the 
right of a usurpation, which, in theory, has sup- 
planted republican government by a tyranny. 
The same revolution extended through the coun- 
try would make every State government a despot- 
ism, and the form of representative rule a farce. 

Yet we yield to it as a necessity. A necessity 
which is above law is the issue of the first false 



96 My Portfolio. 

move which gave the franchise to men who were 
neither fitted for it, nor able even to understand 
it. Through no fault of theirs — poor souls ! — 
they were lifted to an eminence which they had 
never known enough even to ask for. The sym- 
pathies of the best minds of the nation must be 
with them, rather than with their lordly superi- 
ors. They have done as well, in their unnatural 
elevation, as anybody could have been expected 
to do, if suddenly and volcanically tossed into 
responsibilities so vastly above their education 
and their history. 

But it is no kindness to them to suffer our com- 
passion to blind us to the facts of their condition, 
which both they and we must now face together. 
The facts of the situation have driven our theo- 
ries out of sight. We can not help seeing that 
there are things in the administration of States 
which are more potent than numbers. We have 
to count other things than heads, white or black. 
We must confess that intelligence, culture, knowl- 
edge of the art of government, the habit of rule, 
pride of ancestry and historic prestige, have more 
real power in ruling a great State than the brute 
force of hands. The "bayonets" which "think" 
beat back thrice the number of those which do 
not think. Upset society to-day by plunging these 
thinking forces underneath, and heaving ignorance 
and inherited debasement, and the traditions of 
slavery, to the top, and the first thing we learn is 
that society will not stay thus upset. It inevi- 



Woman-Suffrage judged by Negro-Suffrage. 97 

tably turns over again into its natural condition, 
stands on its natural feet, and erects again its 
natural head, let the majority of the bits of paper, 
in or out of the ballot-box, count for whom they 
may. The head comes uppermost, let the hands 
do what they will. 

Color and hair, and nose and lips, have nothing 
to do with such a revolution and counter-revolu- 
tion. Any race in South Carolina, fresh from the 
auction-block and the lash of the rice-field, could 
no more govern an intelligent and cultured mi- 
nority, heirs to the history of South Carolina, than 
a herd of buffaloes could govern Minnesota. To 
this fact of political science our whole theory of 
government by majorities has been forced to suc- 
cumb in a day. Think what we may of it, the 
fact is there, and our theory is nowhere. Such 
is the exorcism of the body politic, by which it 
rids itself of a tampering with the franchise which 
was against nature. The hopeless despotism under 
which New York is drifting towards bankruptcy 
is only another fruit of the same reckless exten- 
sion of suffrage at the North. Such silent revolu- 
tions are mightiest issues of apparently smallest 
forces. They resemble that in which an ounce of 
water in midwinter may rend asunder a ton's 
weight of granite in a night. 

Where, now, is the parallel between negro-suf- 
frage at the South and the proposed suffrage of 
woman? In respect to intelligence and culture, 
and their prerogatives, it does not exist at all. 



98 My Portfolio. 

Whether it exists in respect to the instinct and 
capacity of government, may be an open question. 
But the parallel is clear in this, which is the ulti- 
mate fact in both cases, that the ballot is given, 
or supposed to be given, not to exceptional classes, 
few in number, but to the half of the population 
which has no physical power to defend it. They 
can neither take it by force, nor hold it if assailed 
by force. 

" Who would b&free, themselves must strike the blow." 

A principle of political destiny is expressed in 
these words, than which gravitation is not more 
sure. Liberty, such as is involved in the gift of 
suffrage, is impossible, on any large scale, to a 
race, or nation, or tribe, or class, which has not 
power to take the right, if it is a right, and to 
hold it against all aggressors. This is the secret, 
back of all other causes, of the failure of negro- 
suffrage at the South. Excess of numbers by a 
few thousands or tens of thousands is of no ac- 
count, where the cultured brain, the heirloom of 
centuries, is all on the side of the minority. The 
negro majority, in receiving the ballot, received 
an elephant. They did not know what to do with 
it ; and, in the very first real conflict about it, they 
could not defend it by force of arms. Such a ma- 
jority is not fitted for the ballot; nor is it their 
right, in any sense which implies a blessing in it, 
till they reach a stage of civilization in which 
they can not be " bulldozed " out of it. 



Woman Suffrage judged ly Negro-Suffrage. 99 

Before the war, when servile insurrection was 
threatened, the Southern planter used to smile, 
saying, " One gentleman is a match for three ne- 
groes." So he was, so long as the traditions of a 
free race backed him up, and the traditions of 
a slave race weighted the negro down. Why did 
Gov. Chamberlain call on the National Govern- 
ment for troops to execute the will of the legal 
majority of South Carolina? With twenty thou- 
sand able-bodied majority at his beck, why did 
he not summon them to execute their own will 
in the defense of their own rights and his ? Gov. 
Rice would have done that in Massachusetts. 
Gov. Robinson would have done it in New York. 
The Governor of Ohio proclaimed the natural 
law of State government, when he was impor- 
tuned, in the midst of the late labor strikes, to 
telegraph to Washington for troops, and replied, 
" I will not ask for one bayonet from the Presi- 
dent till every loyal citizen of Ohio is whipped." 
Why did not Govs. Chamberlain and Packard act 
on the same theory? 

They dared not do it. As wise statesmen and 
humane men, they could not do it. They knew 
that that would mean a war of races. They knew, 
that, in such a war, the weaker race must go down. 
They knew that numbers, unless overwhelming 
beyond the facts of any black majority in the 
South, was the least important factor in the prob- 
lem. The citizens of Liberia show only a prudent 
estimate of the relative strength of the two races, 



100 My Portfolio. 

by their law that no white man shall own a rood 
of land within the bounds of the republic. Hay- 
tiens, in their revolt against the French in the 
time of Toussaint L'Ouverture, showed the same 
shrewd foresight in the motto of one of the insur- 
gent banners : " One white man too much for St. 
Domingo." The white race in either of the revo- 
lutionized States of the South, in such a war of 
races, if let alone by the North, would have been 
the conqueror in a month. No surer way could 
have been devised to remand the black race to 
slavery under laws of peonage, than to have ini- 
tiated the war of races just then and there, at the 
close of a political campaign which had convulsed 
the nation, and ended with a disputed succession. 

No : there was no hope for the negro ; and in 
mercy to us all Gov. Chamberlain held still, 
though it was in his power to plunge the conti- 
nent into civil war. Laws of nature had been dis- 
regarded in giving the franchise to majorities who 
were unfit for it, with no checks conservative of 
the ascendency of intelligence and of property; 
and, at the very first real trial of the principle, 
the retribution came. He was the true statesman 
who bowed in silence to the inevitable. 

Is it said, in reply, that this assumes that right 
depends on might? I answer, Some rights do de- 
pend on might. The right of revolution does. 
Besides, the objection begs the question. Suf- 
frage, abstractly considered, is nobody's "right." 
No "Bill of Rights" ever read that "all men are 






Woman-Suffrage judged by Negro-Suffrage. 101 

entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
ness — and the elective franchise." Suffrage is 
primarily a responsibility, and a fearful one. The 
"right" to it is an aftergrowth, depending on 
many things, of which one is the power to defend 
it. It is no kindness, but a fearful wrong rather, 
to lay it upon a crowd of beings who must fling 
it away in a panic at the first call to protect it by 
resort to arms. 

Here, then, lies the parallel between the suf- 
frage of the negro and the proposed gift of it to 
women. Unlike in every other point vital to the 
argument, the two are alike in this, except that 
the disadvantage of woman is fourfold that of the 
negro, — that the distribution of physical power 
renders the gift neither a right nor a blessing. 
That which was unnatural, because untimely, to 
the negro, must be for ever unnatural to woman. 
She could never defend it if contested by man. 
She could never enforce laws enacted by majori- 
ties of female voters, in opposition to men. A 
war of races would be a tragedy. A war of sexes 
would be a farce. 

Moreover, legislative hostility of the sexes is 
no bugbear. It is not all improbable. Take but 
a single case. Suppose a declaration of war by 
a majority of female legislators, sustained by a 
majority of female voters. War is declared, sup- 
plies are voted, taxation is decreed, and conscrip- 
tion ordered, by the major voice of woman. Her 
natural aversion to bloodshed goes for nothing in 



102 My Portfolio. 

the hypothesis. History shows that war and its 
pageantry are popular with the female sex. Its 
weaknesses in that direction are quite equal to 
man's. Once in a fight, woman is a more unrea- 
soning animal than man. No other mobs equal 
those of women in ferocity. Witness the Fau- 
bourg St. Antoine. 

Our late civil war was largely the work of 
women. Intelligent Southerners say that the so- 
cial impulse which drove their section into rebel- ; 
lion was the furor of its women. I have been 
told by one well informed of the facts, that even 
South Carolina probably, and Georgia certainly, 
would never have seceded, but for the mordant 
sarcasm of their refined and cultured ladies, which 
made it impossible for chivalrous young men to 
resist the current. Few little incidents of the 
war so impressed upon our soldiers the intensity 
of Southern attachment to the "lost cause," as 
that of the Mississippi maiden, who, in defiance of 
her triumphant foes, sang "Dixie," with unbroken 
voice and flashing eye, while the home of her 
childhood was burning to the ground under their 
torches. 

So, too, since the conflict of arms has ceased, we 
are told that the conflict of opinion and of feeling 
is kept up most bitterly by Southern women. No 
other class of Southern society is so difficult of 
"reconstruction" as its intelligent and high-born 
ladies. Planters, merchants, lawyers, physicians, 
journalists, of the South, accept the situation with 



Woman- Suffrage judged by Negro-Suffrage. 103 

equanimity, and her soldiers with generosity, when 
their wives and daughters will not permit so much 
as the hem of their garments to touch in the street 
those of their Northern sisters. When Gen. Butler 
was in command at New Orleans, it was the high- 
bred ladies of the city who spat in the faces of 
officers of the Federal army. Could one Southern 
man have been found who would have done that ? 

The opposition of woman to man in the prose- 
cution of war and its collateral measures, then, is 
not impossible. Let that hostility express itself in 
legislation, and who is to execute its will? Who 
shall carry on the war ? Who is to enforce the legis- 
lative will of woman in any thing, if man opposes 
it ? The popular parody on " Woman's Will " may 
do for the ball-room. It is not argument : it is a 
wretched libel upon woman, which has neither wit 
nor wisdom. 

In sober earnest, woman with the gift of suffrage 
would be just where any other half of society 
would be if destitute of resources to defend the 
gift. A majority of women, like the majority of 
negroes, must forego the gift whenever the frenzy 
or the trickery of political passions deprives them 
of it. In both cases, there is no power behind to 
protect it. In both cases, the gift of it is legislation 
against nature, though for very different reasons. 
Such legislation must be expected to work dis- 
aster in a hundred ways which no human wisdom 
can foresee. Fight with gravitation, and you are 
sure to be worsted in catastrophes which gravita- 



104 My Portfolio. 

tion never would have developed if it had not 
been resisted. Dam up the Mississippi, and con- 
test its passage to the Gulf, and you must reckon 
upon floods and inundations away back to the 
gorges of the Rocky Mountains. So long as water 
runs down hill, so long will Nature have her way 
in the affairs of States as well, in defiance of en- 
actments of law, and voices of majorities. 






XII. 

KEIOKM IN THE POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN. 

The unsoundness of a social or political reform 
is sometimes indicated by a certain animus which 
runs through the reasoning of its advocates, quite 
as clearly as by the inconclusiveness of the reason- 
ing itself. With some honorable and able excep- 
tions, this appears to be the rule in the advocacy 
of the reform of which the extension of the suf- 
frage to women is the initial measure. 

1. A reverent believer in the Scriptures can 
not but detect evidence of this distorted animus 
in the coolness with which the biblical argument 
in the negative is ignored by the most positive ad- 
vocates of the reform. For distinction's sake, and 
in justice to a different class of its advocates, they 
may be called " the left wing " of the reform. One 
is reminded of the fling which used to be thrown 
at the Bible by the corresponding wing of the 
old antislavery reformers, whose answer to the 
objection that the Bible tolerated slavery was, 
" So much the worse for the Bible, then ! " 

If the Scriptures are clear and positive on any 
subject relating to the organization of society, they 

105 



106 My Portfolio. 

are so on this, of the position of woman in the 
order of nature. St. Paul defines it beyond the 
reach of cavil. He reasons upon it, not as an 
Oriental, but as a cosmopolitan. He pronounces 
judgment upon it, not as a priest, but as a philoso- 
pher. He goes back to the beginning of things. 
He finds his reason for the subordination of woman 
in the very act of her creation. He could not well 
have put the case in a way more flatly antagonistic 
to the opposite extreme of our day. What the 
inspired teacher meant to say on the subject admits 
of no reasonable doubt. If fire is fire, the apostle's 
theory of the social economy under which God 
placed the two sexes at the beginning, and which 
Christianity leaves as it finds it, makes man the 
head, and woman something other than the head ; 
man the power of government, and woman not that. 
Yet, notwithstanding the indubitable force of 
the inspired reasoning, it is scarcely ever heard 
of among those who chiefly give character to this 
modern revolution. They often ignore the bibli- 
cal argument with the flippancy with which one 
might dismiss the law of the Koran on the subject. 
Inspiration goes for nothing. St. Paul is no more 
to the purpose than the author of the Book of 
Mormon. We are afraid of a reform which starts 
with such an animus towards the word' of God. 
It is not a philosophical treatment of a great au- 
thority. It is not a judicial treatment of great 
precedents. It is not a Christian treatment of a 
revelation from heaven. 



Reform in the Political Status of Woman. 107 

2. A similar defect in the animus of its reason- 
ings is found in the antagonism which the reform 
seems to foster between the sexes. Is not this 
the first time in the history of the race that such 
antagonism has assumed the dignity of a great 
humanitarian revolution ? " The Subjection of 
Woman " is the mildest title which Mr. Mill could 
invent even for his philosophic and able essay on 
the subject, and the latest synonym is "The White 
Male Dynasty." The sexes are made to appear 
as master and servant, as usurper and victim, as 
tyrant and slave. Woman, as the reform will have 
it, lies under the hoof of man. Maidenhood and 
marriage are only different phases of the vassalage 
to which the sex is born. Law, the creature of 
man's w T ill, admits no other destiny. So far as the 
reform works out its normal results, it tends to 
mutual suspicion and alienation. It is infusing an 
element of mutual defiance into our legislation on 
the interests of the sexes. The drift of it is to 
leave absolutely nothing which law can reach to 
their mutual confidence and affection. Its aim 
seems to be to barricade the sexes against each 
other. Our statute-books already bristle with de- 
fenses of woman against man. Marriage, therefore, 
as it looks in legislation, is but a truce to chronic 
war ; and we are told that this is but the begin- 
ning of things. 

Evidence is not distant that the legitimate fruit 
of all this is ripening in many families. Women 
whose gentle and trustful natures would never 



108 My Portfolio. 

dream of a sense of servitude in their lot are told 
of " chimeras dire " in the very construction of the 
old English marriage-vow, under which duchesses 
and queens have "lived and loved and died" for 
centuries. Unsuspecting wives are tempted to 
believe there must be some fire where so much 
smoke is puffed into their faces. The relation of 
elder sisters to younger brothers — in some re- 
spects the most beautiful, and at the same time 
powerful, phase of domestic life — is often poisoned 
by this infection. The saddest histories in this 
world are unwritten. If those of certain families 
could be known, it would be found that the last 
twenty years have wrought a mournful change in 
many homes. The change is due chiefly to the 
silent repulsions produced by the agitation of this 
reform and by the extreme legislation which it 
has created. Profound instincts in both sexes are 
chafed into morbid remonstrance. Without a 
shadow of reason, wives have grown suspicious of 
husbands, and husbands have retaliated in kind. 
The ancient unity of interests has been broken up. 
Extreme and morbid individualism has been fos- 
tered just where it ought never to have been heard 
of. Persons of gentle birth and refined culture, 
who never would have created such a state of 
things, accept it, unconscious of what they do. 
They breathe malaria in the social atmosphere, 
and can not help being diseased by it. As a con- 
sequence, married life, to many innocent parties, 
becomes one long disappointment of the dreams 
of youth. 



Reform in the Political Status of Woman. 109 

In other cases, young mothers chafe under the 
indignity of household cares. Daughters unmar- 
ried become discontented with the care of aged 
and infirm parents, and sigh for a " mission" in 
some loftier " sphere," which means, in plain lan- 
guage, a more public sphere. They ask, " Why 
should we, rather than our brothers, do this drudg- 
ery ? Why are we, rather than they, doomed to 
this uncongenial and obscure toil? Why should 
the pulpit, the bar, and the senate be open to 
them, and to us the nursery and the hospital? 
Some feel that there was good reason for the old. 
Jewish prayer, " Lord, I thank thee that I was 
not born a woman ! " Such is the drift of this 
innovation where the spirit of " the left wing " 
has full sway. 

To what more probable cause than this can be 
attributed the ominous increase in the number of 
divorces, in the last two decades, in the most staid 
and conservative of our New-England States? 
The statistics published by Dr. Allen of Lowell, 
the Rev. Mr. Dike of Vermont, and others, threat- 
en the rapid incoming of the most morbific of 
all social corruptions. Nothing else is so pesti- 
lent to public virtue as legal immorality. Teach 
woman that marriage under existing conditions is 
vassalage, and then divorce for " incompatibility 
of temper," or any other " skeleton in the house," 
becomes another of her " natural rights." The 
same teaching so adulterates public sentiment 
that it will sustain courts in rulings in which 



110 My Portfolio. 

communism exults, and of which Mormonism 
says, " Have we not told you so ? " 

Is the picture overdrawn ? It is to be hoped so. 
But thus far the worst working of this reform is 
secret. It is history unwritten. It is pent up in 
silent and sullen homes. This is one of the revolu- 
tions which come "in noiseless slippers." But its 
tread is none the less malign. It is like the tread 
of Attila the Hun, who, as the legend reads, left 
never a blade of grass behind. Who does not 
know of homes within the circle of his acquaint- 
ance in which the beginnings of this — if I may 
use a word of rare authority — denaturalizing pro- 
cess are visible ? 

3. The same passionate reasoning is seen in 
the recklessness with which the dignity of mater- 
nity is often flouted in the service of this social 
revolution. To this there are doubtless many 
considerate exceptions. It could not well be 
otherwise. Human nature, it should seem, can 
not often wallow so deep in its own degradation 
that men and women shall degrade their mothers 
in their theories of life. But this reform drifts 
towards that. Much is blurted out in angry de- 
fense of it which implies that. It is the inevitable 
sequence of any theory of life which assumes that 
woman has, or can have, or can discover, in the 
wide world, a " mission " more exalted than that 
of a mother in her nursery. Once fill a young 
woman's mind with the notion that it is a grander 
thing to be a speaker on the platform than to be a 



Reform in the Political Status of Woman. Ill 

wife in a Christian home, that it is a nobler dis- 
tinction to be a successful author than to be the 
happy mother of children, that it is more honora- 
ble to head a half-score of " committees " for pub- 
lic service than it is to be a loving daughter in a 
father's house, the model of refinement to younger 
brothers and sisters, and you can no longer find 
a place of honor in her thoughts for the mission 
of either daughter, wife, or mother. These rela- 
tionships become lost ideas. They must be super- 
latives or nothing. The duties they involve are 
either honors to be proud of, or drudgeries to be 
got rid of. The law of nature which imposes 
them on woman is either the voice of God, or the 
voice of tyranny. In this view is seen the massive 
volume of argument against this reform in the 
title of Dr. Bushnell's book, " The Reform against 
Nature." Never before was so much of solid logic 
packed into four words as we find in this invinci- 
ble thesis. When and where has it ever been 
answered ? One might as easily answer a Mini£- 
bullet. 

4. The same absence of dispassionate argu- 
ment is seen in the frequent ignoring of certain 
objections to the reform, which seem to its oppo- 
nents to involve it in absurdity. Few organic 
changes affecting so radically the interests of 
modern life seem to us to have so few positive 
and relevant ideas as this has in that extreme 
which is now under consideration. For the most 
part, it revolves around two, as in the groove of 



112 My Portfolio. 

an ellipse, and those two are assumptions. They 
are the intrinsic rectitude of the reform, and its 
" manifest destiny." 

To the common judgment of men, for instance, 
it seems a non sequitur so bald that it has the 
look of absurdity, that suffrage should be extended 
to women because it is a " natural right." Natu- 
ral to what ? natural to whom ? natural why and 
wherefore? the average mind questions incredu- 
lously. It finds in itself no affirmative intuitions. 
Has the world revolved through these thousands 
of years of progress without finding out till now 
so remarkable a discovery? Yet what "Bill of 
Rights" ever included it? What "Declaration 
of Independence," in great revolutions, ever as- 
serted it ? What " Magna Charta " ever demanded 
it with mailed hand ? Wise men have founded 
empires and republics on advanced theories of lib- 
erty and equality. Yet when has statesmanship 
the wisest ever built republic or empire on this 
as its corner-stone : " All men and women are by 
nature equal, and are entitled to life, liberty, the 
pursuit of happiness — and the ballot " ? So the 
" Declaration 4 " of 1776 ought to have read, if the 
claim in question is true. Why did not the revo- 
lutionary statesmen of our heroic age, delving as 
they did deep down among the roots of things, 
happen to see so obvious a right as this, if it is a 
right in the very nature of things ? Natural rights, 
it is to be presumed, are not far to seek, nor hard 
to find. They lie near the surface, patent to the 



Reform in the Political Status of Woman. 113 

common sense of men. Yet somehow the common 
sense of men, even under the favoring conditions 
of an age stimulated by a revolutionary atmos- 
phere, does not discern this right in the nature 
of the human mind. We charge that the claim 
has the look of absurdity ; and all the answer we 
get is that it is a right, and has a manifest destiny. 
So of other things involved in this reform, which, 
but for the gravity of the interests at stake, we 
should smile at, so unnatural do they look, at the 
first assertion, to the average of men. The ab- 
surdity of thrusting upon one-half of the human 
race a privilege which they have never asked for, 
and their desire of which is a thing not proved ; 
the absurdity of imposing upon one-half of the 
race a duty the gravest that organized society 
creates, but which they have no power to defend 
in an emergency ; the absurdity of holding woman 
to military service, as she must be held if she is 
to stand on any fair terms of equality with man 
in the possession of this " natural right ; " the ab- 
surdity of the intermingling of the gravest duties 
of the court-room and the senate-chamber with 
those of the nursery, — these, and other like things 
involved in the proposed revolution and its se- 
quences, we claim have the look of absurdity to 
the average sense of mankind. Yet they are com- 
monly treated either flippantly or passionately in 
the attempt at rejoinder ; and once and again we 
are told the revolution is right because it is right, 
and it must succeed because it will succeed. 



114 My Portfolio. 

If any thing more specific than this is urged in 
reply, we still find a want of relevance which 
reminds us of the popular fling, which we would 
gladly forget, at a " woman's reason " for things. 
We ask, for example, for a plain answer to the 
argument from the biblical order of creation, in 
which man was first, and woman was ordained to 
be his helpmeet, and we are told that men beat 
their wives. We ask for a reverent answer to 
St. Paul's reasoning, and we are informed that 
St. Paul was a bachelor. We ask what to do with 
the apostle's inspired command to wives, so marked 
in its distinction from his commands to husbands, 
and we are reminded that the apostle was a Jew. 
We urge the impossibility of woman's defending 
the ballot by force of arms, and we are answered 
that woman is a slave. We argue the incongruity 
of the duties of maternity with those of the jury- 
box and the bar, and we are instructed gravely 
that men are tyrants, usurpers, brutes. We speak 
of the dignity of marriage and the sacredness of 
motherhood, and we are met with the discovery 
that woman has a "mission." So the changes 
ring on a few ideas, of which we fail to see the 
logical relevance to the point. 

We can not help knowing that great revolutions 
carry with them great complications. The whole 
order of society is involved in them. They never 
end where they begin. They never do away with 
one institution, one usage, one abuse, and stop 
there. They have a course which they must run, 



Reform in the Political Status of Woman. 115 

intricate and inevitable. They shake the world 
under the tramp of their progress. Sooner or 
later, armed men are apt to spring up in their 
wake. Such must be the destiny of this one, if it 
succeeds. Not a single interest of society can 
escape it. The ballot is but the first of its de- 
mands. The whole sweep of the relation of the 
sexes, and all the duties and rights of both, must 
come under revision. Natural foundations on 
which organized society has been built from the 
beginning of time, and without which it is a thing 
not proved that organized society can exist at all, 
must be torn up, if this reform is carried consis- 
tently to its maturity. Nothing else like it exists 
in history. No other theory of life has ever cut 
every thing loose from the experience of the race, 
and put every thing at hazard on an unproved 
and untried hypothesis. If such a reform is even 
to be talked of in the seclusion of universities 
and libraries, every step in its inception should 
be calmly measured, every principle involved 
should be dispassionately studied, every argu- 
ment for and against it should be weighed judi- 
cially. If it does not start right, it can end, even 
as a theory, only in chaos. Specially should the 
animus which controls it be reverent to the word 
of God, and respectful to the common sense of 
men. 

There is a " right wing " of this reform which 
may command the trust of conservative and Chris- 
tian men. Such men have already supported it : 



116 My Portfolio. 

they were pioneers in it before the " left " extreme 
was developed. It covers especially four things ; 
viz., the higher education of women, the exten- 
sion of the range of their employments without 
loss of caste, their protection from swindlers in 
their tenure of property, and the extension of 
their usefulness in organized charities. My space 
forbids the discussion of these any further than 
to say of them two things. One is, that they are 
yet very largely on trial ; and no right-minded man 
will do other than to welcome any results which 
fair and full experiment shall prove. The other 
is, that every true interest of woman in the experi- 
ment can be gained without complicating it with 
the question of suffrage, and the more wisely and 
quickly gained by its deliverance from the unnatu- 
ral suspicions and alienations which political agi- 
tation inevitably creates. Organic improvements 
in social life are always most healthfully advanced 
when they are made to take the type, not of re- 
form, but of development, not of revolution, but 
of growth. 



XIII. 

THE LENGTH OF SEEMONS. 

A straw may show which way the wind blows. 
So the drift of opinion respecting the length of 
sermons indicates, as it seems to me, certain perils 
which we shall do well to ponder. 

1. It indicates the danger of a disuse of doctri- 
nal preaching. Any one who knows the interior 
of sermonizing knows that thorough discussion of 
any thing which deserves it requires time. No 
intelligent preacher ever did or ever will discuss 
the standard doctrines of our faith in sermons of 
a half-hour's length. Doctrinal preaching must 
become obsolete, is now obsolescent, under the 
imperious demand of the popular taste for brevity. 

The surest way to make such preaching inani- 
mate is to crowd its massive themes into thirty 
minutes. I once heard in the city of Boston a dis- 
course on the nature, the necessity, the methods, 
the author, and the evidences of regeneration, all 
within thirty-five minutes. It was dryer than the 
chips of the ark. A chapter from the table of 
contents of " Knapp's Theology " would have been 
as impressive, and more instructive. It fell upon 

117 



118 My Portfolio. 

a restless audience like lead, and by no means 
molten lead at that. 

Say what we may of the power of compression, 
we must not demand of a preacher impossibilities. 
We do not demand them of other public speakers. 
Mr. Evarts spoke four days, and Mr. Beach as 
many more, on the trial of Mr. Beecher. Edmund 
Burke spoke nine days on the impeachment of 
Warren Hastings. Rufus Choate once spoke four 
hours in prosecution for a stolen turkey. It was 
the speech which first made him famous. Lawyers 
who gain their cases wear no strait-jackets of 
thirty minutes. 

Why do we demand of a preacher limitations 
which we never impose on other men who have 
a business of real life on hand ? Is it not because, 
for the time being, we do not feel that theirs is 
a business of real life? There is the rub. Be 
it so, or not, the conclusion is foregone, that you 
can not have masterly discussion of the doctrines 
of our faith in harangues of half an hour. Under 
such a policy we shall eventually have a Liliputian 
ministry. The themes and methods of the pulpit 
must degenerate into claptrap. The half-hour for 
this generation means fifteen minutes for the next. 

2. A second peril is, that our theological faith 
itself will become obsolete. In this matter the 
pew is dependent on the pulpit. The taste of the 
hearer will be formed by the practice of the preach- 
er. Silence of doctrine in the pulpit means igno- 
rance, and at last unbelief,, in the pew. 



The Length of Sermons. 119 

The result does not come in the form of a catas- 
trophe. No moral convulsion scatters the faith of 
centuries in a night. The end comes insidiously. 
A single doctrine of the system grows dim ; the 
people can not give a reason for their faith in it ; a 
phosphorescent skepticism throws odium upon it ; 
fellowship with unbelievers in it becomes an open 
question, and then the end of it is not far off. 
Yet it is more than the end of that doctrine. The 
faith we hold is a system. No mind can self-con- 
sistently, and no thoughtful mind will, surrender 
one element of it without putting in pawn its faith 
in all the rest. 

Do we not see signs of such theological degen- 
eracy in our own times? Is not the taste for theo- 
logical inquiry declining in our churches ? Thirty 
years ago I once heard the pastor of a church in 
Boston say that there were laymen in his church 
who had read more theology than he had. Are 
there such laymen in any church in Boston now ? 
Who of our laymen now store their libraries with 
the standards of theological science ? Who, out- 
side of the clergy, reads now the works of Presi- 
dent Edwards ? Yet I have in my library a copy 
of those works, well worn by the thoughtful and 
devout study of the senior deacon of the Pine- 
street Church of Boston in 1845. His sabbath 
recreation he used to find in reading Edwards on 
" God's End in Creation." 

I may be wrong (I surely do not mean to croak); 
but, to my view, one of the most formidable signs 



120 My Portfolio. 

of a decline of theological taste among us is this 
clamor of the people for sermons of thirty minutes, 
and their chuckling with delight, like children ten 
years of age, if the complaisant preacher is con- 
tent with twenty. Yet they are not so far wrong 
as he is. A preacher whose subjects and trains 
of thought can be commonly discussed in twenty 
minutes gets all that he deserves if he be tolerated 
so long as that. 

3. One other peril follows, as a matter of course. 
It is that our Congregational churches will deteri- 
orate in character by a radical change of stock. 
From their beginning, these churches have appealed 
to the most thoughtful classes of the people. They 
have been built up from a thinking stock. We 
have alwaj'S demanded an educated clergy in our 
pulpits. We have esteemed as above all price a 
high-toned theological literature. Wherever New- 
England Congregationalism goes, one of the first 
signs of its existence is a college. We build col- 
leges before we build bridges. 

Hence our denominational strength is in our 
pulpits. Our forms of worship are needlessly and 
perilously bare. Our ministry are not a priest- 
hood, and our communion-tables are not altars. 
Our architectural taste is not fascinating. Our 
antiquity is nothing burdensome. Our strength 
is in our pulpits, or nowhere. In this respect we 
but represent the stalwart character of our theol- 
ogy. It is yet to be proved that we can change 
our record in these things, without alienating from 



The Length of Sermons. 121 

us the thoughtful and conservative classes, on 
whose support Congregationalism has lived, and 
whose religious sympathies it represents. It is a 
dangerous experiment to tamper with the old 
stock. 

Specially is any thing a peril to us which un- 
dermines our pulpit. Ours must be a reasoning 
pulpit. It must penetrate things, prove things, 
build deep, and build high. To do this, it must 
discuss great themes in great ways. It must 
handle strong doctrines, elemental truths, the 
landmarks of Christian thought, which centuries 
have elaborated. It can never live on evangelistic 
labors, nor on what is now understood by " re- 
vival-preaching." 

That is a far-reaching and may be a fatal error, 
therefore, which would stifle our preachers by the 
gag of fifteen minutes, or throttle them with the 
garotte of the half-hour. The danger is, that 
the result will be to hand over to wiser build- 
ers the natural stock of Congregational churches, 
and leave us to — the east wind. 

We will not, then, say, as the Kev. Thomas H. 
Skinner, D.D., of New York used to say, and as 
he could afford to say, " If my people will not 
hear me an hour, they may stay away." But we 
beg our thoughtful laymen, who can and who 
ought to give character to the public taste in this 
thing, that they will reconsider their apparent 
verdict thus far expressed. 

Encourage a thinking ministry. Cultivate stu- 



122 My Portfolio. 

dious hearing. Welcome doctrinal discussions. 
And, that these things may be done, give the 
preachers time to say their best wisdom, their 
richest experience, their profoundest teachings of 
the Holy Spirit. Do not make the tastes of your 
little children the rule of your pulpits. Are ye 
not men ? 

A good sermon is worth a hearing of three- 
quarters of an hour : that will do for the general 
average. But for the best sermons, on the most 
profound of themes, give us the full hour. We 
are but men. We can not preach by telegraph. 
The lightning does not play upon our tongue. 
Some of us are slow of speech. The bees did not 
drop honey on our lips in our cradles. Bear with 
our infirmity, and do not double it by requiring 
of us what apostles never did, and could not 
have done if they would. 



XIV. 

THE OALVINISTIO THEOET OP PEEAOHING. 

There is something sublime in the audacity 
with which a certain class of journalists insist 
upon the decadence of that type of theology which 
has for three centuries been dominant in the reli- 
gious thought of Christendom. When an eminent 
teacher of that theology retires from his profes- 
sional chair, to gather up the fruits of forty years 
in which he has reconstructed the forms of the 
old faith, giving to it improved statements and 
definitions, and adding unequaled brilliancy to 
its defenses, he is politely bowed out of sight by 
the fling that his is a defunct belief. It is not 
only obsolescent, but obsolete. It is dead, dead, 
dead, never to be revived in the religious thinking 
of the world. One erudite critic even goes so 
far as to affirm that the reason for the learned 
professor's retirement is that the theology he has 
taught is dead. Not the secret reason only, held 
in mortified silence, but the avowed and official 
reason, as the critic will have it, is, that the the- 
ology of the venerable teacher is dead. He retires 
with melancholy confession of a wasted life. His 

123 



124 My Portfolio. 

life's work can no more be tolerated by a dis- 
gusted and indignant world. Like the superin- 
tendent of a bankrupt factory, he is dismissed as 
one whose services are no longer wanted. 

Well, so be it, if so it must be. Learned pro- 
fessors can take care of themselves. But, before 
bidding a long farewell to this faith of our fathers, 
it is worth while to give one backward look upon 
it, for the sake of seeing what it has been and 
has done for the generations it has held in bondage. 

One representation of it is found in the Calvin- 
is tic pulpit of some half-score of religious denom- 
inations. Indeed, in one aspect of it, its most 
brilliant history is in the pulpit. Our greatest 
theologians have, as a rule, been our greatest 
preachers. The distinctive glory of their faith is 
that it can be preached. It has given to the 
Church an ideal of Christian preaching which is 
unique. That ideal is built on strong thought 
from biblical resources. It has created the most 
solidly intellectual and biblical pulpit known in 
Christian history. The ablest clergy of the world 
have preached this "defunct" theology. Litera- 
ture has received from them almost all the literary 
standards which have had their origin in the pul- 
pit. Everywhere their pulpit has found affinities 
with the most intellectual elements in Christian 
communities. It has commanded the docile hear- 
ing of a larger proportion of men than any other, 
and has held them in reverent attendance on 
public worship in ages of unbelief. It has at- 



The Calvinistic Theory of Preaching. 125 

tracted more powerfully than any other, men of 
the liberal professions. Senator Hoar has but 
recently acknowledged the obligations of the bar 
to the training of the pulpit. And it needs 
hardly to be said, that the pulpit which has trained 
the leading minds in the history of the American 
bar has been chiefly the Calvinistic pulpit. Under 
various denominational titles, the Calvinistic ideal 
of preaching has been the one from which the 
most eminent jurists of our land have derived 
inspiration. From Samuel Adams downward, 
they have learned from the pulpit how to reason 
upon the most profound problems and principles 
of civil government. From discussions of the 
divine government they have learned what human 
government ought to be. Even Thomas Jefferson 
confessed that his first clear conception of a re- 
public came from the polity of an obscure Baptist 
church in Virginia. 

That large class of minds, also, from the middle 
ranks of society, which represents the culture 
of mind as distinct from the culture of man- 
ners, has come under the teaching of the Cal- 
vinistic pulpit more largely than under that of 
any other. Our pulpit has met the demand 
of thinking men for a thinking clergy, for preach- 
ers who are at home in libraries. It has created 
preachers who could stand the draft which the 
pulpit makes on a permanent ministry. Service 
of forty and fifty years has not exhausted their 
resources. In the most powerful religious awa- 



126 My Portfolio. 

kenings of the recent ages this style of preaching 
has held in tlancl the emotive surges of large audi- 
ences, and kept them safe from fanatical vagaries, 
as no other theory of preaching has done or could 
have done. In the most cultivated periods of 
history, and the most agitated periods, in which 
men have run wild with unbelief, it has com- 
manded the conservative forces of society. Thus 
it has furnished solid bottom on which to anchor 
popular inquiry. Centuries of discussion have 
accumulated improvements which the ruder forms 
of its faith needed. Thus improved and rounded, 
that faith lives to-day, the most virile repre- 
sentative of Christian thought which the world 
contains, in the form of popular belief. It is 
pre-eminently the people's faith. They believe 
it. Their hearts respond to it. So far as any 
thing of human origin can receive the divine 
sanction in history, this high-toned intellectual 
ideal of a Christian pulpit has received it. It 
speaks for itself in no uncertain strains. A cen- 
tury of retrograde movement and consequent dis- 
aster could not blot out the record of what it has 
been and has done for the redemption of man- 
kind. Die it may, if die it must; but, as Daniel 
Webster said of the heroic age of our Republic, 
" the past at least is secure." 

To cull but a few illustrious names here and 
there from the roll of this Calvinistic ministry, 
mark the pulpit of Calvin himself at Geneva, that 
of John Knox in Glasgow, that of Dr. South in 



The Calvinistic Theory of Preaching. 127 

London, that of Chalmers in Edinburgh, and of 
his successor, Dr. Candlish, that of Edwards in 
Northampton, that of Hopkins in Newport, that 
of Davies in Virginia, those of Spring and Alex- 
ander in New York, that of Albert Barnes in 
Philadelphia, those of Dr. Griffin and Dr. Beecher 
in Boston, and that of President Finney in Ober- 
lin. These pulpits have passed into history. 
They were filled by men of the Pauline stamp 
of intellectual coin. The majority of them were 
productive of profound religious awakenings, 
which, but for them, would have run into mael- 
stroms of fanaticism. They created, and, what 
is more, controlled such awakenings in the inter- 
est of a thoughtful piety. This they did by their 
union of a rousing eloquence with a solid think- 
ing power. They illustrate magnificently the 
practicability of uniting great hearts with great 
intellects, deep feeling with deep thinking, intel- 
lectual conquest with the baptism of the Holy 
Ghost. Such commingling of elements in the 
world's leaders constitutes the power which God 
honors in great crises of history. In the stillness 
of its working he makes his voice heard. 

Are such pulpits dying out of the world's 
thought? Is the faith they have taught deca- 
dent ? Is the system of agencies which they have 
transmitted to thousands of living pulpits sinking 
into popular contempt ? Where are the signs of 
it? They vary in vital vigor: sometimes for a 
decade they will seem less powerful than before. 



128 My Portfolio. 

No great system of agencies is always equal to its 
history. But, all things considered, we do not 
see in the Calvinistic pulpits of America any per- 
vasive signs of decay, such as must be seen when 
the life-blood of the faith they teach runs low to 
the death. Somehow these pulpits still gather 
under their sway docile and believing audiences 
every Lord's Day, in numbers unequaled by any 
other weekly gatherings at the bidding of the 
same voice. What other social forces are taking 
the place of these ? What other names of popu- 
lar repute are supplanting those which this Cal- 
vinistic pulpit has made venerable in our history ? 
It requires but very few words from unbelieving 
lips to consign verbally to oblivion a great truth, 
a great book, a great system, a great man; but 
to sweep out of being the work which these have 
done in the world, — that is a different affair. 

Early in the autumn I have heard three or four 
crickets under the hearthstone serenading each 
other in voices sharp and shrill, which seemed as 
if they were a thousand strong. They made the 
whole house ring. But the solid earth moved on 
its way, the autumn passed into winter, the crick- 
ets died, and were no more heard. Such a passing 
racket are the harpings of a few skeptical minds 
upon this everlasting claim that our faith is de- 
funct, our theology obsolete, our pulpit dead. As 
to any real force in these flings at the old theol- 
ogy, either in giving it its death-blow or express- 
ing its history, they remind me of Robert Southey's 



The Calvinistic Theory of Preaching. 129 

answer to a flippant critic, who declared that 
"The Edinburgh Review" had crushed Words- 
worth's " Excursion." " Crush the Excursion ! " 
said the brother-poet, pointing up to the moun- 
tain back of Wordsworth's home : " you might 
as well try to crush Skiddaw I " So say we to 
these dapper critics of the theology and of the 
pulpit which are built into our history: "as 
easily crush Skiddaw ! " Yes, " the strength of 
the hills is His also." 



XT. 

THE THEOLOGY OP "THE MAEBLE FATO." 

This masterpiece of Hawthorne presents a mar- 
velous picture of the Christian theology on the 
nature of sin, and its workings in the human soul. 
An epitome of the story, familiar as it is, is neces- 
sary to illustrate the point in question. 

Miriam, a passionate young artist, is betrothed 
in her youth to a man who becomes a monster in 
iniquity. She flees to Rome to escape the bond- 
age, but not without incurring suspicion of her 
own innocence. There she hopes to outlive and 
bury the past, which hangs like a pall over her 
memory and her character. Her hated paramour, 
if such he was, finds his way also to Rome, and 
suddenly confronts her in her rambles in the Cat- 
acombs, as a monk. He persecutes her with his 
marital claims and threats of exposure. Mean- 
while, she has made the acquaintance of Hilda, a 
singularly pure and high-souled sister-artist, and 
of Donatello, a young Italian who is the personifi- 
cation of infantile joyousness and moral weakness. 
Between him and Miriam there springs up the 
inevitable love-tie of romance. 

130 



The Theology of " The Marble Faun." 131 

At length it is the fate of those two to encoun- 
ter the wretch, who dogs the steps of the unfortu- 
nate girl, on the brow of the old Tarpeian Rock. 
There the tragedy of the story is perpetrated. 
Donatello, in a paroxysm of jealous rage, springs 
upon him, throttles him, and lifts him over the 
edge of the precipice. Just then, casting his eyes 
around inquiringly, he catches Miriam's answering 
look of approval, and he dashes the lost man to 
the bottom, where he lies a mangled corpse. Her 
friend Hilda, at a little distance, hears the muffled 
sound of struggle, and, turning, reads with her 
keen artistic sense that fatal look in the face of 
Miriam. The deed is done, witnessed by the 
shocked eye of innocence, and the friends go on 
their way. 

Out of these materials, and others of secondary 
meaning, is wrought a most vivid reproduction 
of the biblical doctrine of sin as an experience 
flaming in human souls. Among a multitude of 
points in which a Christian reader detects the re- 
semblance, the following are the most vivid : — 

1. The spiritual and subtle nature of sin. A 
single look of the eye was all of Miriam's partici- 
pation in the deed ; yet when it is done, and the 
blackness of it begins to cloud over the lost inno- 
cence of Donatello, he says, " ' I did what your 
eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, 
as I held the wretch over the precipice.' These 
last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it 
be so ? Had her eyes assented to the deed ? She 



132 My Portfolio. 

had not known it. But alas ! looking back into 
the turmoil and frenzy of the scene just acted, she 
could not deny — she was not sure whether it 
might be so or no — that a wild joy had flamed up 
in her heart when she beheld her persecutor in 
mortal peril. Was it horror, or ecstasy, or both 
in one? Be the emotion what it might, it had 
blazed up more madly when Donatello flung his 
victim off the cliff, and more and more while his 
shriek went quivering downward. With the dead 
thump on the stones below had come an unuttera- 
ble horror. 

" 4 And my eyes bade you do it,' repeated she. 
4 Yes, you have killed him, Donatello ! He is quite 
dead, stone dead I Would I were so too ! Yes, 
Donatello, you speak the truth. My heart con- 
sented to what you did. We two slew yonder 
wretch.' " 

2. With equal vividness he paints the despair 
of unpardonable guilt. 

Says Miriam to Donatello, " ' You are shaking as 
with the cold fit of a Roman fever.' 

" ' Yes,' " says Donatello, " i my heart shivers.' 

" ' My sweet friend, what can I say to comfort 
you?' 

" ' Nothing. Nothing will ever comfort me. I 
have a great weight here. Happy ? Ah, never 
again — never again ! Ah, that terrible face — do 
you call that unreal? ' " 

Again, after years of unavailing remorse, the 
horror-stricken man thus pictures to an unsuspect- 



The Theology of " The Marble Faun." 133 

ing stranger the scene of a death by being flung off 
a precipice. " ' Imagine a fellow-creature, breath- 
ing now and looking you in the face, and now 
tumbling down, down, down, with a long shriek 
wavering after him all the way. He does not 
leave his life in the air. No ; but it stays in him 
till he thumps against the stones. Then he lies 
there, frightfully quiet, a dead heap of bruised 
flesh and broken bones ! A quiver runs through 
the crushed mass, and no more movement after 
that — no, not if you would give your life to make 
him stir a finger. Ah ! terrible, terrible ! Yes, 
I would fain fling myself down for the very dread 
of it ; that I might endure it once for all, and 
dream of it no more. ' " 

3. There is a profound insight into the expe- 
rience of real life in the author's picture of the 
recoil of guilt from the services of religion. 

Speaking of the monster monk, he writes, 
" There was something in this man's memory which 
made it awful for him to think of prayer. Nor 
would any torture be more intolerable than to 
be reminded of such divine comfort and succor as 
await pious souls merely for the asking. The 
torment was perhaps the token of a temperament 
deeply susceptible of religious impressions, but 
which had been wronged, violated, and debased, 
till at length it was capable only of terror from 
the sources that were intended for our purest 
and loftiest consolation." 

4. One can not but think of the day of judg- 



134 My Portfolio. 

ment in reading Hawthorne's conception of the 
inevitable exclusion of the guilty from the innocent. 
Miriam, reflecting on the change which crime 
had wrought in her relations to her friend Hilda, 
feels in her soul the unnaturalness of a friendship 
between such angelic innocence as Hilda's and 
such guilt as her own. She soliloquizes, " ' I will 
never permit her sweet touch again. My lips, my 
hand, shall never meet Hilda's more.' " Soon they 
stand face to face. " Miriam at once felt a great 
chasm opening between them two. They might 
gaze at one another from the opposite side, but 
without the possibility of ever meeting more ; or 
at least, since the chasm could never be bridged 
over, they must tread the whole round of eterni- 
ty, to meet on the other side. There was even a 
terror in the thought of their meeting again. It 
was as if Hilda and Miriam were dead, and could 
no longer hold intercourse without violating a spir- 
itual law. 'Hilda, your very look seems to put 
me beyond the limits of human kind.' " 

5. With the same terrible truthfulness to life, 
he represents the overwhelming recoil of innocence 
from guilt. Hilda, on meeting Miriam, puts out 
her hand with an involuntary repellent gesture. 
When Miriam, forgetful of her resolutions, pleads 
with her by the sacredness of their common woman- 
hood, to befriend her as if her guilt were nought, 
Hilda exclaims, " ' Do not bewilder me thus, Mir- 
iam. If I were one of God's angels, with a nature 
incapable of stain, and garments that could never 



The Theology of " The Marble Faun" 135 

be spotted, I would keep ever at your side, and try 
to lead you upward. But I am a poor, lonely girl, 
whom God has set here in an evil world, and 
given her only a white robe, and bid her wear it 
back to him as white as when she put it on. 
Your powerful magnetism would be too much for 
me. Therefore, Miriam, before it is too late, I 
mean to put faith in this awful heart-quake, which 
warns me henceforth to avoid you. God forgive 
me if I have said a needlessly cruel word.' ' 

6. Inspired thought is scarcely more real in de- 
claring the curse of the very knowledge of sin to 
innocent beings. Says Hilda, " ' It is very dread- 
ful ! Ah, now I understand how the sins of gen- 
erations past have created an atmosphere of sin 
for those that follow. While there is a single 
guilty person in the universe, each innocent one 
must feel his innocence tortured by that guilt. 
Your deed, Miriam, has darkened the whole sky. 
Every crime destroys more Edens than our own.' ' 

7. The novelist becomes more truthful than the 
painter in portraying the terrific nature of conflict 
with sin. Miriam, reasoning from her own deathly 
consciousness of the evil of sin, thus criticises 
Guido's painting of Michael and the Dragon : 
" ' The archangel now, how fair he looks, with his 
unruffled wings, with his unhacked sword, and 
that exquisitely fitting sky-blue tunic, cut in the 
latest paradisiacal mode ! What a dainty air of 
the first celestial society ! With what half-scorn- 
ful delicacy he sets his prettily sandaled foot on 
the head of his prostrate foe ! 



136 My Portfolio. 

" ' But is it thus that Virtue looks the moment 
after his death-struggle with Evil ? No, no ! I could 
have told Guido better. A full third of the arch- 
angel's feathers should have been torn from his 
wings, the rest all ruffled till they looked like 
Satan's own. His sword should be streaming with 
blood, perhaps broken halfway to the hilt. His 
armor crushed, his robes rent, his breast gory, a 
bleeding gash on his brow, cutting right across 
the stern scowl of battle. He should press his 
foot hard down upon the old serpent, as if his 
very soul depended on it; feeling him squirm 
mightily, and doubting whether the battle were 
half over yet, and how the victory might turn. 
The battle was never such a child's play as Guido's 
dapper archangel seems to have found it.' ' 

8. Milton's conception of the horrible affinity 
between sin and death is recalled by Hawthorne's 
conception of the loathsome brotherhood of sin. 
Over against the solitude of sin, in. its seclusion 
from innocence, lies the equally truthful fact of 
the fraternity of all guilty beings with each other. 
"Their deed had wreathed itself, as she had said, 
like a serpent, in inextricable links, about both 
their souls, and drew them into one by its terrible 
contractile power. It was closer than a marriage- 
bond." 

" ; O friend ! ' cried Miriam, i are you conscious, 
as I am, of this companionship that knits our 
heart-strings together ? ' 

"'I feel it, Miriam: we draw one breath, we 
live one life. Cemented with his blood.' 



The Theology of " The Marble Faun" 137 

" The young man started at the word which he 
himself had spoken. It may be that it brought 
home to the simplicity of his imagination what he 
had not before dreamed of, — the ever increasing 
loathsomeness of a union that consists in guilt, 
cemented with blood, which would corrupt and 
grow more noisome for ever and for ever, but bind 
them none the less strictly for that. 

" They turned aside for the sake of treading 
loftily past the old site of Pompey's forum. 

11 ' There was a great deed done here,' she said, 
— " a deed of blood like ours. Who knows but 
we may meet the high and ever sad fraternity of 
Csesar's murderers ? ' 

" ; Are they our brethren now? ' said Donatello. 

" 4 Yes, all of them,' said Miriam, ' and many 
another, whom the world little dreams of, has been 
made our brother and our sister by what we have 
done within this hour.' 

"At the thought she shivered. Was it true, 
that whatever hand had a blood-stain on it, or had 
poured out poison, or strangled a babe at its birth, 
or clutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and 
robbed him of his few last breaths, had now the 
right to offer itself in fellowship with their two 
hands? Too certainly that right existed. It is 
a terrible thought that an individual wrong-doing 
melts into the great mass of human crime, and 
makes us — who dreamed only of our own little 
separate sin — makes us guilty of the whole ! Thus 
Miriam and her lover were not an insulated pair, 



138 My Portfolio. 

but members of an innumerable confraternity of 
guilty ones, all shuddering at each other." 

These are but few of the master-touches with 
which genius pictures sin, as disclosed in the 
experience of human souls. Dramatic tragedy, 
from iEschylus to Shakspeare, employs the same 
solemn problems of destiny and decree which 
give to the Calvinistic theology its deathless sway 
over the human mind. Dr. Holmes, in the story 
of " Elsie Venner," finds it necessary to the truth- 
fulness of fiction to interweave unmistakable 
hints of the old doctrine of " original sin," or, as 
we prefer to call it, of "inherited depravity," in all 
its fearfulness. Not otherwise can genius keep 
literature true to the facts of life. So Hawthorne, 
in " The Marble Faun," with no theological intent, 
but aiming only to paint the real life of guilt, as 
seen and felt in the depths of souls, puts on the 
canvas with like vividness the biblical and Cal- 
vinistic idea of the nature of sin and its wrathful 
workings. George Eliot, in " Middlemarch," does 
the same, and the firmament of criticism is ablaze 
with admiration. 

Such, then, is sin, as genius finds it in the living 
world of men and women. Is it a reality, or a 
dream ? If a reality, then is it a dream that sin 
deserves the eternal anger of God, and that the 
human conscience is commissioned of God to say 
that ? If a reality, then is it a dream that undy- 
ing guilt must become an " undying worm " ? If 
a reality, then is it a dream that sin needs for its 



The Theology of " The Marble Faun" 139 

extinction in the soul the regenerating power of 
the Holy Ghost ? If a reality, then is it a dream 
that sin needs for its forgiveness an atonement by 
the eternal Son of God? If a reality, then is 
that whole system a dream which men have de- 
nounced as the " Blood Theology " ? Great truths 
stand or fall together. The whole Calvinistic sys- 
tem starts with, and is built on, the facts of sin. 
What that is, and how that works, give character 
to all the rest. Which of us, then, are the wak- 
ing ones, and which the dreamers ? 

Hawthorne stands confessedly at the head of 
our American literature as an original painter of 
real life. The most accomplished of American 
critics, one whose word gives law to our literary 
judgments, ranks Hawthorne's name among the 
first five on the roll of the whole literature of our 
language. Which horn of the dilemma, then, 
shall we be tossed on? Is the biblical notion of 
sin which genius finds deep in the experience of 
souls, and paints in such lines of lurid fire, the 
true one ? Or is genius itself a liar, and its work 
a cheat for fools to be scared at, and for wise men 
to laugh at ? Which shall it be ? 



XYL 

THE DEBT OP THE NATION TO NEW ENGLAND. 

It is comparatively well known that M. De 
Tocqueville, in his study of the philosophy of our 
government, found, as he judged, the germinal 
idea of the whole structure in the town-meeting 
of New England. He pronounced it the corner- 
stone of our liberties. That principle of the demo- 
cratic town-meeting dates back to the very infancy 
of the New-England Colonies. It was the first 
experiment of common sense to organize govern- 
ment for the common weal. 

It is not so generally known that the country 
owes to New England another principle, quite as 
vital as that of the town-meeting, and which has 
become a part of the organic law of the Federal 
Government, and of every State Government in 
the Union. It is the principle of the duality of 
our system of legislation. The plan of commit- 
ting legislative authority to two bodies, instead of 
one, each co-ordinate with the other, and each 
having the power of veto over the other, is, in the 
American form of it, of American origin. The 
English houses of Lords and Commons are not 

140 



The Debt of the Nation to New England. 141 

parallel, because one represents hereditary author- 
ity, and neither is fully representative of popular 
choice. We have extended over the whole land a 
network of dual legislation, emanating from the 
popular will. The principle is a most profound 
one in theory, and vital to national existence in 
its working. More than one republic has perished 
for the want of it. More than once has the con- 
servative balance which it creates saved our own 
government from anarchy in crises of peril. It 
creates a movable weight which can be thrown 
into either scale, — that of Democracy, or that 
of Federalism ; that of popular rights, or that of 
central power, — as the exigency of the time may 
require. Many times, probably, has the national 
Senate saved the country from demagogism in 
the House of Representatives. It was believed by 
wise men at Washington, in the time of President 
Polk, that we should have had war with England, 
over the north-western boundary, but for the 
conservative check of the Senate upon the hot 
legislation of the House. Through all the great 
North-western States the war-cry ran like a prai- 
rie-fire : " Fifty-four, forty — or fight ! " 

This principle of duality, like that of the town- 
meeting, dates also far back to the very birthday 
of government in colonial history. The occasion 
which gave rise to it would appear, but for the 
gravity of the results, comically diminutive. 
" There fell out a great business," writes Gov. 
Winthrop, "upon a very small occasion." It il- 



142 My Portfolio. 

lustrates signally the ways of Divine Providence 
in using small things for great issues, and things 
despised, for ends to be held in honor through all 
time. A very striking feature in the character of 
the Puritans was their quickness to accept the 
divine interpretation of small things. No man 
was more far-sighted in this respect than Gov. 
Winthrop. His was the guiding hand which led 
the colonists to the adoption of the dual govern- 
ment. Yet it had so lowly an origin as a suc- 
cession of pettifogging lawsuits and churchly 
investigations about the ownership of a stray pig. 
The story runs thus : one widow Sherman lost 
a valuable sow in Boston, which found its way 
upon the premises of a Capt. Keayne. The cap- 
tain was a man of property and social standing, 
but in somewhat ill repute as a hard man in his 
dealings. He summoned the town-crier to cry 
the pig in what is now the thronged thoroughfare 
of Boston commerce. The town-crier cried the 
pig in vain. No claimant appeared for nearly a 
year. Meanwhile the captain, as he affirmed, 
slaughtered a pig of his own, which had been 
domiciled with the stray sow. By and by the 
widow Sherman came to see the stray one. But 
the tests of the personal identity of swine are not 
very sure ; the General Court had not passed judg- 
ment upon them, and the widow was puzzled. 
Pigs have a way of marvelous change in a few 
months of growth. She could not swear to the 
countenance of the runaway as the one which she 



The Debt of the Nation to New England. 143 

had known in its infancy. That which had been 
"a thing of beauty" was such no more. The 
conscientious widow would not take oath that it 
was her lost pet. But the captain could not lay 
claim to more than one pig ; and she hit upon a 
second thought which was ingenious, if not in- 
genuous. She declared, through some clairvoyant 
intuition of her own, that the captain's slaugh- 
tered pig, which she had never seen, was hers. She 
professed to believe that the butcher had "stuck" 
the wrong victim. 

Things were becoming mixed. The dispute was 
brought, after the manner of those times, before 
the reverend elders of the First Church of Boston 
for adjudication. Each party appeared, and told 
his or her own story. The elders, after due 
deliberation, decided that the widow's claim was 
" not proven," and advised her to go about her 
household cares. The captain was exonerated, 
and the happy possessor of two pigs, or their 
equivalent, one of which was confessedly not his. 
When was ever the owner of lost pig content 
under such conditions? Widow Sherman at any 
rate was not to be thus appeased. She brought 
her case to trial before a jury. But they agreed 
with the elders, and, moreover, were so ungallant 
as to vote three pounds damages to the captain, 
" to pay his costs." Thus encouraged, he turned 
upon the widow with a suit for defamation of 
character; she having, in the greatness of her 
wrath, come down upon him with the charge of 



144 My Portfolio. 

theft. " He stole the pig, and away he ran," said 
she. She was worsted in the second suit. The 
plaintiff recovered damages to the tune of forty- 
pounds, — a sum, perhaps, not much less in value 
than five hundred dollars of our liquid currency. 
When did suitor for the recovery of a stolen pig 
sit down content under such injustice ? She ap- 
pealed to the Great and General Court. Things 
were becoming interesting. Five hundred dollars 
for a runaway sow, and the honorable Legislature 
of Massachusetts for a court of final appeal ! 

This brings the story to its more dignified chap- 
ters. Up to that time the Legislature was a single 
body, consisting of the magistrates, who, by offi- 
cial rank, constituted a class by themselves, and 
the deputies, who were the chosen representa- 
tives of the people ; but both sat together in one 
chamber, and voted as one body. The illustrious 
pig gave occasion to a grave division of opinion. 
Capt. Keayne was, for the times, a rich man. Mrs. 
Sherman was comparatively poor, and a widow 
withal. The local prejudices against the captain 
as a hard man came into play also. The irrepres- 
sible conflict between the rich and the poor raged 
through the Colony, and aggravated the causes of 
dissension. The majority of the magistrates sided 
with the captain, and the majority of the deputies 
with the widow, seven not voting. If a full vote 
could have been had, the widow would have had 
the best of it. 

Under these conditions the magistrates, as they 



The Debt of the Nation to New England. 145 

had the legal right to do, interposed their nega- 
tive upon further proceedings ; so that the case as 
it stood legally was " not determined." But this 
left the uncomforted widow under the mulct im- 
posed by the jury, — of forty pounds to be paid to 
the exultant captain. He had the equivalent of 
two pigs besides, and the widow none. " Much 
contention and earnestness there was," writes the 
calm, conservative governor, and well there might 
be. The losing party, involving through sym- 
pathy, by this time, a very respectable following 
of the widow, charged that the poor had been 
oppressed out of deference to the rich. Many 
" spoke unreverently of the court." Especially 
did the magistrates come in for their full share of 
opprobrium, because it was their negative which 
had left the widow under damages in her suit. It 
was charged that they had " turned aside the poor 
in the gate." Seven days were consumed in debate, 
and the case came again before the elders of the 
church, who found no relief for widow Sherman, 
but sustained the magistrates in their negative. 
It was an obvious case of conflict between the 
clear-headed intelligence on the one side and the 
heated sympathies and prejudices of the people on 
the other. 

The consequence was, that all parties began to 
revise their opinions as to the fundamental struc- 
ture of the Legislature, especially as it concerned 
the relations of the two classes in it to each other. 
Gov. Winthrop, whose remarkable wisdom piloted 



146 My Portfolio. 

the infant Colony through graver troubles than 
this, interposed his private counsel to Capt. 
Keayne, and persuaded him to return to widow 
Sherman a part of the forty pounds which she 
had paid him under stress of law. With this she 
was compelled to be content, and the famous pig 
retired from the history of the world. Not so, 
however, the grave question which had been 
started about the construction of the legislative 
body. The people saw, or thought they saw, that 
the negative of the magistrates gave to a few 
individuals a power dangerous to Republican lib- 
erty. Gov. Winthrop saw the gravity of the issue, 
and improved wisely the opportunity to bring 
about a change in the organic law of legislative 
authority. He procured a reference of the ques- 
tion to the reverend elders for advice to the next 
General Court. This was a ruse to gain time, 
M that so the people's heat might be abated ; for 
then he knew that they would hear reason." 
Time passed on, the " people's heat " was abated ; 
and when the court assembled, and heard the re- 
port of the elders, the people " did hear reason." 
Before the court adjourned, the upshot of the 
matter was, that two legislative bodies were organ- 
ized, — the magistrates on the one side, and the 
deputies on the other. To each was assigned a 
chamber of its own. Each received the power of 
negative over the action of the other; that is, 
the action of two bodies was made necessary to 
legal legislation. That was the beginning of our 



The Debt of the Nation to New England. 147 

present State Senate and House of Representa- 
tives. It was the first experiment of dual legisla- 
tion on this continent. 

More than a century later, in the great debates 
on the formation of the Federal Union, John Adams 
took a leaf from the early history of Massachusetts. 
He defended the dual principle of legislation 
against the reasonings of Turgot, which were ad- 
vanced and approved by Dr. Franklin. Adams 
was successful. He secured the introduction of 
the principle into the organic law of the United- 
States government, from thence it has been ex- 
tended to every one of these States in the structure 
of its State Legislature. "Tall oaks from little 
acorns grow." The loss of a screw-driver delayed 
the arrival of a part of Gen. Pakenham's artillery 
at the battle of New Orleans in 1814, and in conse- 
quence he lost the battle and his life. A greater 
issue was impending in the loss of widow Sher- 
man's pig. A secret providence guided the actors 
in this episode of colonial history, till their dimin- 
utive plans encompassed the liberties of a nation. 
It is not the first time that God has employed the 
pig-headedness of both man and beast to bring 
about incalculable designs of his own. 

The story illustrates, also, another principle in 
the ways of God. It is, that the costs of great 
things to the instruments employed are to be esti- 
mated, not in view of the littleness of causes and 
occasions, but in view of the magnitude of results. 
It seems ludicrously disproportionate, that a stray 



148 My Portfolio. 

pig should convulse a colony of grave and earnest 
men who were here for a great destiny. It makes 
one laugh at dignified governors and sedate depu- 
ties, and reverend divines, to see them contending 
for months, and debating seven days at a stretch, 
and interspersing solemn prayer, to settle a petty 
quarrel of the farmyard. Had they crossed the 
ocean, and braved the wilderness and the savage, 
for no better business than this? But turn the 
story end for end. Read it backward. Look at 
the immensity of the results to come from it. See 
a great nation set upon the trail of a grand politi- 
cal discovery ; the evolution of a principle which 
was to consolidate a nation's freedom ; fifty sover- 
eign States awaiting, before coming to their birth, 
their security from anarchic revolutions; a federal 
union to be made possible over a continent which 
was to become the home of unborn millions; 
and all the glowing possibilities of good to the 
tribes of the whole earth contingent on the suc- 
cess of one ! 

Under that law of providence by which great 
good always involves great costs, it was fitting 
that such results as these should come about with 
costs of vexation and struggle, and great ado, to 
the actors and instruments stationed back at the 
beginning of things. It was becoming that grave 
legislators should sit in troubled conclave, and 
that reverend ministers should join in solemn 
prayer, and that the whole body politic should be 
stirred up in wrathful debate, when such a grand 



The Debt of the Nation to New England. 149 

morning was about to dawn on the world. So is 
it with all the more fearful costs of great things in 
toil and suffering, and throes of death. They are 
to be estimated by the magnitude of God's ends, 
not by the pettiness of man's beginnings. We 
have asked in dumb horror for the reason why one 
bullet, from the hand of the one most despicable 
of mankind, should be permitted to end a great life 
in agony, and plunge a nation into grief. Wait 
and watch. The end is not yet. We shall by and 
by see some good coming from the event which 
shall be commensurate with such cost ; some great 
blessing gained, or some great tragedy escaped, 
which shall seem to be worth even the loss of such 
a life by such a death. There never was and 
never will be an hour of wasted suffering in this 
world. 



XVII. 

OUGHT THE PULPIT TO IGNORE SPIRITUALISM ? 

No, and for the following reasons ; viz., — 
1. It is an extensive and still growing delusion. 
This is not so obvious in Eastern cities as in 
the country towns and at the West. Up among the 
hills of New Hampshire and Vermont, and in the 
interior counties of Maine, it is found sometimes 
in such strength as to be a very positive drawback 
to churchly influence and the growth of general 
culture. Where the resources of social excitement 
are few, the home of a clairvoyant often attracts 
more interest than the lyceum lecture or the ser- 
mon. Where churches are declining through de- 
crease of population, there spiritualism is often 
rife. It seems to be german both to a decaying 
and an unorganized state of society. Wherever, 
for any reason, more healthy causes of excitement 
do not exist, this diseased and effeminate develop- 
ment of popular credulity takes their place. Home 
missionaries find it one of the most insolent forms 
of infidelity in the North-western States and on 
the frontiers of civilization. In some towns it 
claims to be the only form of religious faith that 

150 



Ought the Pulpit to ignore Spiritualism ? 151 

has organic life. Wherever French and German 
communism takes root, the same soil gives nutri- 
ment to this opposite, but not contrary, super- 
naturalism. The old story is often repeated in 
coalitions of opposite schools of infidelity against 
the church of Christ, — Herod and Pilate are 
made friends together. 

True, the claims of spiritualists as to the growth 
of the sect must be taken with large allowance. 
They have a comfortable way of laying claim to 
all those who admit the historic reality of the phe- 
nomena on which their faith is founded, and even 
all who inquire into them for the entertainment of 
idle hours. Thus, Gen. Banks, the Hon. Stephen 
A. Douglas, President Lincoln, Lord Brougham, 
Queen Victoria, Napoleon III., and, as one spirit- 
ualist expressed it, " half the crowned heads in 
Europe," have been claimed as "believers." Dr. 
Nichols of Haverhill understands them to claim 
three millions in this country and six millions in 
Europe. Nine millions for a sect which has yet 
to celebrate its first semi-centennial ! Where is 
Gen. Walker of the Census Bureau ? Such elas- 
ticity of reckoning is of course preposterous. But, 
making heavy deductions from it, the residuum 
is still painfully large. A single fact gives, per- 
haps, the most accurate hint of the reality : it is, 
that the leading organ of the sect in this country 
is said to have a circulation of a hundred thousand 
copies ; and, so far as I know, the claim is not dis- 
puted. 



152 My Portfolio. 

2. It is a seductive form of error to several 
classes of minds in all communities. Idle minds — 
an increasing class in prosperous times — find in 
it entertainment when time hangs heavy. Those 
who are fond of the marvelous, and who crave a 
glimpse of the unseen world, find a feast at the 
spiritualistic seance. The same causes which lead 
the ignorant, and many, also, who would resent 
that epithet, to the gypsy-camp or the hut of an 
Indian fortune-teller, give to the clairvoyant phe- 
nomena a lurid interest which captivates many, to 
their lifelong hurt. The naturally credulous and 
superstitious are a large proportion of any commu- 
nity. Those who have been bereaved of friends, 
also, in their mental weakness welcome any thing 
that promises to them communion with the de- 
parted. It is marvelous on what scanty evidence 
these will yield tearful faith to the revelations of 
the spiritualistic seer. Proof on which they would 
not risk the ownership of a horse is accepted as 
adequate evidence that the world of spirits is wide 
open to their gaze, and even that they join hands 
again consciously and palpably with the loved and 
lost. 

The fact deserves notice, also, that, in modern 
and Western nations, this depraved type of super- 
naturalism is almost all that Christian civilization 
has left intact that can take the place of Oriental 
magic and European astrology in ministering to 
certain tastes which are deep-seated and perma- 
nent in human nature. The old allurements to 



Ought the Pulpit to ignore Spiritualism ? 153 

those tastes have disappeared ; but the tastes 
themselves remain, and will have something to 
feed upon. In all the past ages they have dis- 
closed a grim tendency to demonism, even to the 
extreme of devil-worship. Why should we not 
expect them to thrive upon the food which spir- 
itualism generates, specially in its swampy and 
malarial low grounds ? 

Another large class whom this error allures 
consists of those who have long starved their moral 
sensibilities by one form or another of religious 
negations. These often spring, with a rebound, 
to any form of supernaturalism which the age fur- 
nishes. The supernatural in some form the human 
mind will have. Human nature craves it as the 
normal food of its sensibilities. Those who have 
most stoutly resisted faith in biblical miracles, and 
Hebrew prophecies, and apostolic inspiration, are 
often the first to succumb to this modern necro- 
mancy. They sometimes mingle in a strange 
medley the spiritualistic vagaries with some sort 
of reproduction of the biblical teachings. 

The late Professor Hare of the University of 
Pennsylvania lived through the best years of his 
life an atheist. Of the human soul and its immor- 
tality he used to say, " I know man : I have had 
him in my laboratory full grown ; and I have re- 
duced all there is of him to a gas. I know that 
that is all. I have the evidence of my own eyes 
for it. If carbonic acid gas is immortal, man is 
immortal." But no sooner did he carry his hide- 



154 My Portfolio. 

ous faith to the sSance of a " medium " than the 
atheism of a lifetime gave way, and he affirmed, 
with equal confidence, "I know there is another 
life than this : I know there is a soul which is 
not a gas. I have talked with my father, my 
mother, my sister, in another world : I have the 
evidence of my own ears for it." So, between the 
learned chemist's eyes and ears, it should seem 
that a change for the better, so far as it went, 
had taken place. But did his mind admit, in con- 
sequence of its clairvoyant enlightenment, any 
healthy faith in the Christian religion? Not at 
all. It was only the rebound of a starving mind 
from the grossest materialism to the grossest super- 
naturalism. He once grasped the electrical ma- 
chine in the office of a clairvoyant, and, jerking it 
back and forth, angrily demanded that Jesus Christ 
should come in person to instruct him respect- 
ing the unseen world and his own destiny there. 
Even the necromancer shrunk back, appalled at 
the profaneness of the converted atheist. So, said 
one like-minded, of a former age, " If thou be the 
Christ, save thyself and us." Dr. Hare represents 
a class of minds whose natural but stifled cravings 
for the supernatural drive them to almost any and 
every form of it which does not lay upon them 
the restraints of a spiritual religion. 

3. The popular faith in the supernaturalism of 
the Bible is passing through a transition which 
exposes it to special peril from such a type of error 
as that of spiritualism. This is saying only that 



Ought the Pulpit to ignore Spiritualism ? 155 

which is known and read of all men. We live in 
an age of silent revolution : it is trying severely 
the Christian faith of many. Skepticism is tric- 
kling down through crevices, from the heights of 
literary and scientific culture, to the social strata 
below. The people who compose our churches 
are not so well indoctrinated as their fathers were 
in the fundamentals of their faith. Fewer Chris- 
tian men and women than formerly can give a 
reason for the faith that is in them. I remember 
hearing the Rev. William M. Rogers, then pastor 
of the Central Church, Boston, say, thirty years 
ago, that there were men and women in his church 
who had read more theology than he had. Proba- 
bly it was true. Could a similar statement be 
truthfully made now respecting that church and 
its pastor ? Many most excellent Christians, the 
superiors, it may be, in some other respects, to 
their fathers, in this respect of theologic knowl- 
edge are living largely upon their heritage from 
a more stalwart age. Their faith is not so well 
defined as that of the fathers : it is held with 
vague hints of drawbacks and qualifications which 
are the more hurtful for their vagueness. Their 
shadows loom up large in the twilight. 

The inspiration of the Scriptures, for example, 
was once held in the bald and simple form of 
"verbal" dictation. Whatever were the defects 
of that type of belief, it had this merit, — that it 
was definite. It was easily expressed, and easily 
applied ; and its authority was unquestioned. 



156 My Portfolio. 

Theological science has changed all that. But, if 
wiser forms of faith in inspiration have sprung up, 
they have not yet taken possession of the popular 
mind with any thing like the vigorous grasp with 
which the theory of verbal inspiration held the 
unquestioning faith of a former generation. This 
period of transition may end in a firmer, because 
a more enlightened and self-consistent, belief; but, 
while the transition lasts, it is a period of peril to 
the faith of multitudes. Many are not qualified 
to say wherein lies the difference between the vis- 
ion of St. Paul, when he was " caught up to the 
third heaven," and the vision of the spiritual seer 
of to-day, who claims the same illumination from 
the same altitude. Who shall instruct the people 
in this thing if the pulpit does not ? 

4. The failure of natural science to give a 
prompt and thorough solution of the mysteries of 
spiritualism lays a special responsibility on the 
pulpit. Some disturbances of the popular faith 
may now be safely let alone, because popular sci- 
ence has so satisfactorily restored the broker, 
equipoise. Science has solved whatever of mys- 
tery there was about them, and all men of average 
intelligence know the fact. Time was, when the 
faith of many trembled at the discovery that the 
earth is more than six thousand years old, though 
the Scriptures, as read for ages by the learned and 
ignorant alike, had declared the contrary. Philo- 
logical science has joined hands with natural sci- 
ence in explaining that contradiction so that 



Ought the Pulpit to ignore Spiritualism ? 157 

nobody's faith is disturbed by it now. But the 
like is not true of the phenomena of spiritualism. 
Nothing else in scientific history has so perplexed 
scientific authorities as this has done. Even the 
simple form of it called "planchette" has been 
well denominated the " despair of science." The 
notion of secret wires and invisible hairs, by which 
wise men once thought to explain these phe- 
nomena, will not do now. Men of sense know 
better. They know what they see with their own 
eyes, and hear with their own ears. To the com- 
mon sense of common men, " unconscious cerebra- 
tion " is not much better. " Psychic force " shares 
the same fate. These are but names of things 
which remain as profound mysteries as before. 
Science has only given us high-sounding titles 
for them. They are too ethereal to explain to 
the average intelligence the facts witnessed by a 
thousand eyes. After all the deductions from the 
phenomena which collusion and jugglery and elec- 
tricity, and "nervous fluid," and " psychic force," 
and "unconscious cerebration," — even admitting 
these last to be more than names, — can account 
for, there remains a residuum which nothing ac- 
counts for on any principle of science which can 
be made clear to popular comprehension. Honest 
scientists admit this. When confronted with this 
residuum of unexplained mystery, they are dumb, 
or they say frankly, " We do not know." 

This inability of science to answer popular 
inquiry on the subject in any way which com- 



158 My Portfolio. 

mends itself to the common sense of men, is a fact 
of great significance to the pulpit. It suggests the 
query, Who shall give answer to the popular in- 
quiry ? As a mere matter of science, it can await 
the wisdom of the future ; but, as a question 
affecting the religious faith of many, it can not 
wait. The people find this nondescript thing in 
the midst of them, and they reasonbly ask solemn 
questions about it. It profanely puts on the sem- 
blance of religion. Men and women are trusting 
to it their hopes of heaven. It tries to take them 
by the hand, and give them comforting words in 
affliction. With one hand it seems to lay hold on 
the nether world, and to let loose vapors that 
smell of fire and brimstone ; and with the other 
it seems to open wide the gates of heaven, on 
more than " golden hinges turning." The people's 
faith is set agape by its vagaries. They reasona- 
bly ask, "What shall we believe? What not 
believe? And why?" Because science is mute, 
they turn to their religious teachers ; and to whom 
else can they turn ? 

5. Once more : the fact that the Scriptures are 
not silent on the subject of necromancy is a fact 
of some significance to the pulpit. The people 
find in the Old Testament perplexing texts about 
witchcraft, about those who have "familiar spir- 
its," about "wizards that peep and mutter." 
Their children read the story of the witch of 
Endor; and bright ones among them do not fail 
to recognize in the raising of Samuel an occur- 



Ought the Pulpit to ignore Spiritualism ? 159 

rence very like to what they have heard around 
the fireside, with large eyes and bated breath, of 
the doings of clairvoyants ; and they ask their 
fathers, and the fathers ask their ministers, what 
it all means. They want to know whether there 
is any difference between the ancient and the 
modern mystery. Inquiry on the subject seems 
to have the biblical sanction. To name the 
Salem witchcraft, with its uncanny associations, 
does not now put an end to the inquiry. Tower 
Hill rather complicates the matter in the modern 
thought. 

Turning, then, to the New Testament, the peo- 
ple read of demoniacal possessions, and of minis- 
tering spirits, and of guardian angels, and the 
prophecy that in the last days there shall be signs 
and wonders of evil purport, which shall, if pos- 
sible, deceive God's elect. They ask what these 
things mean, and the question is not unreasonable. 
When spiritualistic lecturers boldly claim that 
apostolic inspiration was no more than one form 
of clairvoyance, and that ministering spirits are 
departed souls from this world, and that Jesus 
Christ was only the Prince of mediums, the peo- 
ple can not say nay, and give a good reason for it. 

There is, and there has been through all history, 
a world of the marvelous, bordering hard on the 
world of spirits, which the Bible does not ignore. 
It has somewhat to say of that world in limbo, 
almost from its earliest to its latest revelations. 
Inspiration does not retire it to the cloud-land of 



160 My Portfolio. 

an "if," and leave it there. When people find 
in their homes and neighborhoods things which 
inevitably remind them of these biblical scraps of 
mysterious history and prophecy, and specially 
when they find their inherited faith in miracles 
and in inspiration muddled by the modern necro- 
mantic marvels, it is natural, it is reasonable, that 
they should ask, "What do these things mean?" 
And, so long as popular science says never a word, 
who shall give to the people the necessary satis- 
faction, if the pulpit does not ? Has not this thing 
been let alone long enough ? Is it not time that 
the clergy should have opinions about it, which, as 
theologians, they are willing to be responsible for, 
and opinions which shall commend themselves to 
the good sense and the biblical faith of their 
hearers? It can never be beneath the dignity 
of the pulpit to answer any inquiries touching 
religious faith which an honest and sensible peo- 
ple are moved to ask. 



XYIII. 

HOW SHALL THE PULPIT TEEAT SPIBITUALISM ? 

Starting od the most general and assured 
ground of belief respecting this delusion, may not 
much be accomplished by simply exposing the irre- 
ligious drift of it as seen in its own records ? Some- 
thing is gained, if we can show to the satisfaction 
of thinking men that this thing is not religion. 
Whatever else it is, it is nothing that commends 
itself to the religious instincts of men. It has 
neither the self-consistency, nor the dignity, of a 
revelation from Heaven. The profaneness of 
many of its teachings is patent on a very brief 
examination of its organs. Granted that it says 
many true things and good, it has no more of 
these than a religious delusion must have to be 
attractive to believers. 

" Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, 
The instruments of darkness tell us truths." 

Meanwhile, the vile things and false which are 
its practical outcome are sufficient to discredit 
the whole as a system of religion. God does not 
thus contradict himself. 

161 



162 My Portfolio. 

No matter what we may believe, if any thing, 
about the origin of these phenomena, the drift 
of the whole is wrong morally. This can be made 
obvious to the Christian conscience. As a se- 
quence, Christian people can be convinced that 
they should have no part nor lot in the matter. 
If their Christian faith is true, spiritualism as a 
religion is false. The necromantic seance, then, 
is no place for a professed friend of Christ. Tam- 
pering with the thing from motives of curiosity 
is not only an evil, it is a sin. The curiosity 
itself which leads men to seek from such sources 
a knowledge of the invisible world, is itself a sin. 
The delicacy of a Christian conscience can not but 
be blurred by such communion. " This genera- 
tion seeketh after a sign," said the Master to " a 
generation of vipers." 

The pulpit achieves much, if it teaches this 
effectually. Much to the purpose is gained, if we 
can cut this evil adrift from Christian support. 
No other support of it can give it a respectable 
prestige among the religions of the age. Make 
the Church a unit against it, and it can live only 
as one of the religious monstrosities of the times, 
which, like Mormonism, do not carry weight 
enough to make them respectable. No body of 
men can long hold up in broad daylight a thing 
which the judgment of the Christian Church has 
put under ban. That thing must become offensive 
to the moral sense of men. It must rot. 

In the days of the old antislavery controversy, 



Hoiv shall the Pulpit treat Spiritualism? 163 

Albert Barnes used to say to the representatives 
of three millions of slave-property in the broad 
aisle of his church, "Rid the American Church 
of all complicity with American slavery, and the 
thing is doomed." The representatives of the 
three millions knew it to be true, and they were 
silent. The principle is more forcibly true of any 
thing which assumes to be a revelation from 
Heaven, and yet from which the moral sense of 
the Church revolts. Christianity has gained such 
dominion over public sentiment, that no other 
religion, at least, can stand against it. May we 
not, then, preach so much as is here indicated, even 
without knowing much, or believing much, respect- 
ing the power which works the spiritualistic mar- 
vels? 

May not still more be accomplished by a thor- 
ough re-discussion in the pulpit of the teachings of 
the Bible on the subject of ancient magic? Here is 
a point, I think, at which we have slipped. The 
popular recoil from the Salem witchcraft, and 
from the tragedies to which it led, and from the 
diathesis of the age which made those tragedies 
possible, has thrown us all back a long w^ay behind 
the plain teachings of the Scriptures on the whole 
class of subjects to which this belongs. We have 
come to think of them as things to be put down 
with a laugh, or ignored with a smile of contempt. 
But they do not go down at such bidding. Every 
age resuscitates them in one form or another. So 
has it been from the beginning. Heathen history 



164 My Portfolio. 

is full of them. Such is the craving of the human 
mind for the supernatural, that, if you laugh it 
out of faith in one form, it will gravely slide into 
another form, with only difference enough to dis- 
guise its identity. Live it will, even though it 
beg its way into a herd of swine. 

I attribute the growth of spiritualism largely to 
a re-action of this kind. Tower Hill in Salem has 
frightened men out of their mental equipose about 
these things. Not content with denying false 
things, we have swung over to the extreme of 
denying every thing. We have denied facts 
supported by human testimony of such weight 
that it would send the best of us to the scaffold, 
if arrayed against us in a trial for murder. We 
have taught the world, or allowed it to be taught, 
that, if any thing presumes to be done by super- 
human agency, that presumption stamps it as a 
cheat. Have we not, on this class of topics, unwit- 
tingly committed the very error which we charge 
upon the skeptic who affirms that a miracle is per 
se an absurdity ? The natural re-action from this 
policy of faithlessness in the superhuman is this 
wretched travesty of the supernatural which spir- 
itualism would substitute for Christianity. 

What, then, shall we do to remedy the mistake ? 
I answer, for one thing, acknowledge the mistake. 
Then, go back to the biblical methods of treating 
necromancy. Learn what those methods are, and 
teach them to the people. The Bible does not 
dismiss the heathen magic with a laugh or a sneer. 



How shall the Pulpit treat Spiritualism? 1G5 

It does not ignore the thing as too insignificant or 
too low for the dignity of inspiration. It does not 
leave it enveloped in the cloud-land of hypothesis. 
On the contrary, the Scriptures treat it as a fact 
in human history. They discuss it as a significant 
development of idolatry. They forbid dalliance 
with it as a sin. The practice of it the Mosaic 
law punished as a capital crime. The great reli- 
gious reformations on record in the Old Testament 
began with ridding the land of those who dealt 
with familiar spirits. All down the ages, from 
Moses to St. Paul, the Bible thunders with denun- 
ciations of it as a form of devil-worship. When 
aged Christians of the last generation in the Sand- 
wich Islands first heard of American spiritualism, 
they detected instantly its identity with their own 
former worship of evil spirits. They marveled 
that American Christians could tamper with it 
in the face of the biblical warnings against it. 
I repeat, therefore, teach the people the biblical 
treatment of necromancy. Show them the points 
of resemblance between its ancient and its mod- 
ern forms. We may reasonably look for the same 
recoil of the Christian conscience from it that 
was witnessed in the churches of the Hawaiian 
Islands. Very much is gained if Ave can thus 
bring the thing under fire from the battery of 
biblical history. 

May we not wisely advance our mine still farther 
and deeper under the foundations of the delusion 
by resuscitating the popular faith in the biblical 



166 My Portfolio. 

dernonology ? Here, again, I must believe that we 
are suffering from an extreme re-action. Because 
our fathers, at one end of the pendulum's swing, 
believed that Satan was everywhere, we at the 
other end believe that he is nowhere. Because 
they attributed almost every evil thing to his 
agency, we attribute nothing to it. That is to 
say, this is the drift of popular opinion. To our 
fathers the Devil was a real, a personal, an impe- 
rial power. He was the sovereign of a malignant 
empire, which interpenetrated and put in peril all 
human destinies. To them sin was bondage to 
the Devil. They often wrote even the pronouns 
of which his name was the antecedent beginning 
with a capital. The very thought of him moved 
them to defensive prayer. The grand old Litany 
of England's saints reads, "From the crafts and 
the assaults of the Devil, good Lord, deliver us ! " 
Three times does the Litany break forth into sup- 
plication against his malign enchantments. In 
their artless faith they prayed against malignant 
spirits almost in the same breath in which they 
sought deliverance from "battle and murder and 
sudden death." Then, as if it were the climax 
of divine blessing, they pray the Lord "finally to 
beat down Satan under our feet." In dead ear- 
nest they put their whole Saxon souls into the 
wrestle with the unseen adversary. Have we 
grown any wiser in "changing all that"? Are 
we nearer to the solemn teachings of God's word 
when we use the Devil to point an epigram, or 



How shall the Pulpit treat Spiritualism ? 167 



raise a laugh ? Because our fathers went to one 
extreme, if it was an extreme, are we wiser than 
they in going to the other ? Yet is not this to a 
large extent the condition of the popular faith 
to-day ? And has not the velvet theology of the 
pulpit in part produced it ? 

What is the effect of the change on the history 
of spiritualism? Just this: we have lost faith — 
an operative, living faith, I mean — in the only 
thing which can at present explain this modern 
necromancy biblically and philosophically. It 
finds us all dumfoundered. Restore the popular 
faith in the fact of a satanic kingdom on earth, 
and put into that faith the biblical vividness of 
belief, and my conviction is, that, with such a 
leverage as that faith would give, the popular 
mind would make very quick work with spiritual- 
ism, and every thing of that ilk. 

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not forget 
the conquests of science in our times over the 
occult things of nature. I am not unmindful of 
the possibility that scientists may yet explain that 
residuum of mystery which thus far they have 
simply handed over to the police, and which the 
police have sagely handed back again. Specially, 
I do not ignore that wise conservatism of faith 
which would fain reduce the supernatural in hu- 
man affairs to the minimum. This is as it should 
be. And, when science advances our knowledge 
to the long-desired discovery, it will be our duty 
to welcome it, and to adjust our faith to proved 



168 My Portfolio. 

facts. We will not cling to faith in will-o'-the- 
wisps, after the laboratory has manufactured phos- 
phorus. But do we not, as religious teachers, 
encounter a grave difficulty, which it is our prov- 
ince to remedy if we can, in the fact, that, at pres- 
ent, science is impotent to help us to the discovery, 
and that the mystery does not seem to lie in the 
domain of physical science alone, but partly in 
our spiritual nature ? There is mind in it : there 
is the rub. There is a certain remnant, to say 
the least, of necromantic intelligence, before which 
science is dumb. It knows no more than we do. 
It talks to us learnedly of " unconscious cerebra- 
tion," and "psychic force," and such like things; 
and, when we try to put them into Saxon for the 
instruction of the people, they do not know what 
we mean. Do we ourselves know ? As practical 
men in a practical emergency, can we afford to 
wait for science to relieve us by that kind of verbal 
wisdom ? 

Do we not need for present use some simple yet 
philosophical explanation, which shall commend 
itself to the common sense of men and to the bib- 
lical prepossessions of the people, even if our 
respect for science compels us to hold it as only a 
probable hypothesis? And do we not find that 
explanation in the plain teachings of the Bible 
respecting the malign realm of the " Prince of the 
power of the air"? We might not venture to 
create such a solution on our own authority ; but 
finding it, as we do, ready to our hand, may we 



How shall the Pulpit treat Spiritualism? 169 

not use it as a tentative and probable hypothesis, 
till science shall extend our knowledge, if it can, 
to something more satisfactory ? Make this king- 
dom of Satan a reality to the common mind, as it 
was two centuries ago to the ablest of the jurists 
and scientists of England, and then the common 
mind has a plain biblical response at hand, when 
tempted to receive the revelations of spiritualism 
as either an antidote or a supplement to the Chris- 
tian Scriptures. The response is as philosophical 
as it is biblical, " Get thee behind me, Satan." 

Speaking to the same purpose in detail, I would 
say, Vivify the people's faith in the personality of 
Satan. Teach them that he is a power in the 
universe, whom God condescends to treat as a 
belligerent. Bring back the conception which the 
fathers had of him, as the head of an aristocratic 
empire, supported by a multitude of subordinates 
and auxiliaries. Revive the ancient faith in the 
intimacy of their converse with the minds of men, 
to the extent, possibly, of demoniacal possession. 
The Scriptures nowhere represent that infliction 
— be it disease, or sin, or both — as obsolete. 
Make it a reality to the popular imagination, that 
we wrestle, not with flesh and blood, but against 
principalities and powers. Instruct men to fear 
the craft, rather than the force, of malign tempt- 
ers. Picture their power to charm men with fas- 
cinating revelations. Paint them as angels fallen, 
beings once of light and beauty ; their sovereign, 
Lucifer, the light-bearer, son of the morning. Re- 



170 My Portfolio. 

produce with biblical intensity the great conflict 
of right with wrong in the universe, as a conflict 
between God and Satan. Open men's eyes to the 
vision of this earth as the battle-ground of in- 
visible combatants : make them feel that the very 
air is tremulous with the march of spiritual bat- 
talions. 

This, in fragmentary outline, is the " restoration 
of belief " which the people need to equip them 
well to meet this latest form of the old heathen 
magic. Intrenched in such a faith, they could not 
readily be beguiled by the delusion. The poison- 
ous exotic could not take thrifty root in such 
a soil. Is it not for the want of such a soil in 
the antecedent faith of the people, that the delu- 
sion has taken root so widely and so disastrously ? 
And, if so, what better thing can we do than to 
restore the old faith, shorn of its excrescences? 
What better than to lift back into place the dis- 
located teachings of the Bible ? 

With such a faith antecedently fixed, Christian 
men would inevitably attribute such things as spir- 
itualism to Satanic wiles. These would appear 
to them to be, and would be, the most philosoph- 
ical explanation of those phenomena, of which, as 
now, science and the police should confess their 
ignorance. If the biblical demonology is a fact 
in the divine organization of the universe, and if 
demoniac craft is a fact in the divinely permitted 
economy of probation, what else should seem more 
natural than these marvels over which science 



How shall the Pulpit treat Spiritualism ? 171 

despairs? What else is the demoniac world more 
likely to be engaged in? If it may be that sin, 
matured and aged, tends to reduce the grade of 
guilty intellect, what else is more probable than 
those frivolities and platitudes which make up 
much of the spiritualistic revelations? On the 
other hand, what else than the marvels bordering 
on miracle, which this modern theurgy offers to 
gaping curiositjr, are more likely to be the " signs 
and wonders " which in the last times are, if pos- 
sible, to deceive God's elect ? Are we not in dan- 
ger of believing and teaching too little, rather 
than too much, on a theme so dismal ? 

We are in no danger of restoring faith in the 
tragedies of Tower Hill. Such things as those, 
once lived through in the jurisprudence of nations, 
are never lived over again. They must needs have 
been, to prepare the way for the calmer faith to 
follow. The worst use possible to make of them 
is to allow them to frighten us out of all faith. 
Better exhume Cotton Mather than that. 



XIX. 

FOREIGN MISSIONS AND HOME MISSIONS AS SEEN 
BY CANDIDATES FOR THE MINISTRY. 

The dearth of candidates for foreign missions 
is surely an afflictive, and, in some aspects, an 
alarming fact. That single statement once made 
on the platform of the American Board, " that in 
all our seminaries not one man stood pledged to 
their service," was the blast of a trumpet like 
that by which the warder of the old mediaeval 
castle used to summon the men-at-arms to the 
rescue. Every man in the seminaries should heed 
it, and, if he does not respond in person, should be 
able to show cause. Why the deep and prolonged 
interest in the subject which almost always pre- 
vails in theological seminaries does not result in 
a large and immediate influx of candidates to the 
foreign service is too complicated an inquiry to 
be briefly answered ; yet there is one fact which 
goes far towards an answer to it intelligibly and 
reasonably. 

Turning to the missionarj^ history of theologi- 
cal schools, we find that the revivals of the foreign 
missionary esprit commonly alternate with similar 

172 



Foreign Missions and Home Missions. 173 

waves of special interest in home missions and in 
other departments of the home-work. I mean by 
this, not merely, that, when men do not go abroad, 
they stay at home, but that in the intervals be- 
tween the awakenings to the wants of the heathen 
world have occurred as marked revivals of special 
prayer and solicitude and self-consecration for the 
salvation of this country. The evidences of such 
awakenings are such as in an ordinary church 
would prove the existence of a revival of interest 
in the conversion of the surrounding population. 
Call them what we may, they are upliftings of the 
level of Christian feeling to an unusual height, 
but specially concerned with the work at home 
more than with the work abroad. 

We can not always anticipate what turn to prac- 
tical life the inner spirit of a body of Christians 
will take. Nor can we always explain why it 
should take the turn it does. We may even find 
difficulty in vindicating its estimate of the relative 
worth of things. Still we can not wisely rebuke 
it, nor strive to change its drift. Still less can we 
bind it to the test of any one development. 

There was a time when, in Germany, the spirit 
of evangelical revival declared itself in a special 
interest in the founding and support of orphan- 
asylums. The Orphan House at Halle, founded 
by Hermann Francke, was the representative, for 
many years, of one of the most valuable evangeli- 
cal awakenings in German history. In the middle 
ages a literal obedience to our Lord's command. 



174 My Portfolio. 

" Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor," was 
the form in which many a profound revival of re- 
ligious life expressed itself. Hence, in part, arose 
a multitude of the hospitals, asylums, and retreats 
which are scattered over Europe. The Holy 
Spirit in man looks many ways. The " wheels " 
in Ezekiel's vision of the spirit of life were " full 
of eyes." Such is the spirit of life in the Church. 

Such, in character, are genuine revivals of mis- 
sionary zeal in a seminary. They are one in spirit 
and in power ; but sometimes they drift eastward, 
and sometimes westward, and sometimes they do 
not drift at all. Now they concentrate attention 
upon China, India, Japan, and then upon Dakota, 
Oregon, California; and again, with every ap- 
pearance of the same missionary consecration, the 
young men choose the little church in the Green 
Mountains, or the metropolitan pulpit, or the mis- 
sion church under its shadow. 

One illustration of the westward drifting of 
such a missionary revival is the formation at 
Andover of the well-known Iowa Band. In that 
more than Holy League eleven men allied them- 
selves to go to that then desolate territory. Their 
success is some evidence that they were not mis- 
taken in their choice. A very intelligent layman 
of that State has expressed the opinion, that that 
Band from Andover (reduced to nine before 
reaching the field) achieved more than any other 
human agency to save the whole State from 
infidelity. 



Foreign Missions and Home Missions. 175 

Later was formed the smaller but equally illus- 
trious Kansas Band. Its members went to that 
State when it was in the death-struggle with 
slavery. Their usefulness in laying religious 
foundations deep and strong is immeasurable. 
Not only churches and Sunday schools, and the 
establishment of a sabbath, but colleges, libraries, 
the local press, the whole school system of the 
State, and the introduction of the same institu- 
tions into Nebraska and "the regions beyond," 
have felt the influence of their plastic hand. 
They have done their work, too, at the peril of 
limb and life. One of them escaped, by only the 
protection of a rail fence, the infamous Quantrell 
Massacre. Few clergymen live to-day who have 
so much to show for twenty years of work as those 
Kansas pioneers. And they have as many years 
more to labor before " the grasshopper " will " be- 
come a burden." 

Both of those companies of Western volunteers, 
and scores of others of the same guild, were the 
very men, who, if the Lord had not directed them, 
as they believed, to the frontier of our own land, 
would have been very likely to be found to-day in 
the foreign service. When they went westward, 
great disappointment was felt that they did not 
go eastward. Yet who will now venture to say 
that they mis-heard the Master's voice ? Would 
any one of us venture to undo all that they have 
achieved, and veto all that they give promise of 
achieving, in their chosen field, for the sake of 



176 My Portfolio. 

even the magnificent work which they doubtless 
would have accomplished in India or Japan ? 

It is also specially to be remembered that the 
relative claims of the home and the foreign fields 
have not been for the last fifteen years what they 
were before the war. The home-work has ex- 
panded immeasurably in its practicable extent, and 
been intensified unspeakably in its urgency. Are 
we not all trembling before it to-day ? Is not our 
priceless inheritance from our fathers trembling 
in the balance, for the want of a calm, scholarly, 
Christian leadership for the countless hosts of 
ignorance and depravity into whose hands we 
have put, not the spelling-book and the Testa- 
ment, but ballots and muskets ? Is not the weight 
of the destiny of this land often intolerable to 
those who feel called of God to stand under and 
lift it? Do we not feel impelled to hasten the 
work of redemption? Can we afford delay? 
What means the increase of the annual income of 
the American Missionary Association from forty 
thousand dollars before the war to three hun- 
dred thousand now? Does not a profound alarm 
among the Christians in this country express itself 
in this fact ? 

When Gen. Grant was before Petersburg, at a 
critical moment of the siege, his only word of 
command was, "Pour in the men, pour in the 
men!" So do we not all of us judge and feel, 
through all the broken deeps of our souls, that 
the only thing which can save this land for Christ 



Foreign Missions and Home Missions. 177 

is to pour in the men, and to do it now ? West, 
South, North-west, South-west, the whole frontier, 
and strategic keys from the Lakes to the Gulf, 
must be carried soon, or not at all, as it seems to 
all human foresight. 

The protection of our Lord's Day, the salvation 
of our youth from infidelity, the preservation of 
our school system, the planting of even the rudi- 
mental institutions of Christianity in the new 
States, the crushing of Mormonism, the uplifting 
of the negro from the awful slough of ignorance 
and corruption in which freedom has surprised 
him, the not less imperative need of the civiliza- 
tion of the Southern white men, the rescue of 
both races in the Southern half of the land from 
the clutch of Romanism, the recovery of the whole 
Southern conscience from the obtuseness which 
slavery has inflicted, the substitution of the civili- 
zation of the alphabet for that of the bowie-knife, 
and the christianizing of the American Chinese, 
— these are but the pioneer work of the gospel on 
this continent. The maturity of Christian civiliza- 
tion lies far away beyond them. 

Does not the exigency which is upon us fairly 
open the question, whether a far-seeing policy does 
not dictate a suspension of advance in the foreign 
work, allowing it simply to hold its own, if this is 
necessary to the speedy achievements of certain 
preliminary conquests in this country? Can not 
the world, as a whole, better afford that China and 
Japan should wait twenty years longer for the 



178 My Portfolio. 

gospel than that Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, and 
the Carolinas should wait? Is it not a less evil 
that Africa in the East should wait than that our 
own Africa in the South should ? 

Look at those pitiable colored churches ! What 
are the elements of many of them ? — consciences 
poisoned by fetich-worship yet lurking in the 
blood, corrupted by the degradations which none 
but a slave knows, and these made putrid by the 
more degrading example of the master. In how 
many of them are falsehood, theft, concubinage, 
adultery, a bar to church-membership ? If rumor 
be true, how much above them are some of the 
white churches? Can we venture, is it good policy 
to venture, farther into the heart of heathendom, 
leaving such rotting monstrosities of our Christi- 
anity behind us ? 

The conflict is one, — fought on one field, under 
one strategic Mind, for one grand conquest. 
While the loyal forces are so few, and, relatively 
to the enemy, so feeble, it may not be wise poli- 
cy to " advance all along the line." Said the 
commander of the French forces, witnessing the 
famous "ride upon death" of the six hundred Eng- 
lish cavalry at Balaklava, " It is magnificent, but 
it is not war." So the resolve of the Christian 
Church to evangelize the world in this generation 
might be the sublime of heroism, and yet not wise. 
If, then, there must be a halt anywhere, does not 
the millennial reign require that that halt should 
not be on this Western Continent? Is there 



Foreign Missions and Home Missions. 179 

another country on the globe whose immediate 
evangelizing is so vital to the world's redemption 
as that of our own ? 

Far be it from me to answer these questions 
authoritatively. None but an infinite Mind can 
do that. Still less would I answer them, or ask 
them, to the discouragement of foreign missions. 
Nor is the necessity supposed, by any means to be 
yet conceded. But my sole object in asking these 
questions is to state the case fairly, as it has stated 
itself to young candidates for the ministry, spe- 
cially during the last fifteen years. The question 
of their life's work has come before them under 
an alternative so complicated as to perplex the 
wisest, and so fearful as to appall the boldest. 

To them the cause of Christ in this land seems 
to be in an unprecedented strait. The element 
of speed appears to be a more potent factor in 
the problem of its salvation than in that of any 
other portion of the globe. Every thing seems 
to depend on quick marches. The Napoleonic 
policy, of rapid movement of great forces to great 
conquests, appears to them the only one that 
promises ultimate success. If there is anywhere 
under Christian banners an Imperial Guard, which 
" dies, but never surrenders," but whose presence 
insures victory, they feel that its prestige and 
power are needed here. They explore the West 
and the South, and come back awestruck at the 
impending conflict. They listen to foreign mis- 
sionaries and home missionaries, fresh from their 



180 My Portfolio. 

fields of honor, side by side ; and to the majority 
of them the home-work appears to be in the most 
appalling danger from delay. Results good and 
evil, which elsewhere will accumulate arith- 
metically, must here accumulate geometrically. 
Though inferior vastly in present numbers, this 
land seems to them to be " the key of the posi- 
tion " which must command the field. The power 
which holds it makes conquest of the world. To 
the older continents it is what the chateau of 
Hougomont and the farm of La Haye Sainte were 
to the field of Waterloo. It must be taken and 
held for Christ, or we must say, as Napoleon did 
when the Old Guard broke : " All is lost ! " 

Such is the outlook upon that " field " which " is 
the world," as these young men see it, when they 
ponder the question where to take their places in 
the ranks. Yet, setting aside all these facts, which 
plead so potently for advance quick and strong in 
the home-work, the secretaries of the American 
Home Missionary Society tell them, that for the 
work of that organization alone — if it should make 
no advance, but simply hold its own for twenty 
years to come — not less than fifty new men must 
be furnished every year. If the young men see 
in this condition of things the call of God to them, 
who w r ill venture to dispute their vision ? Who 
of us, in the face of his own life's record, will 
take it upon himself to say that they are deciding 
the question of their life's work with either a 
blind or a self-indulgent judgment ? 



XX. 

FOREIGN MISSIONS, THEIR RANGE OF APPEAL POE 
MISSIONARIES LIMITED. 

" We are three millions, one-fifth fighting men," 
are the words which Webster puts into the mouth 
of the elder Adams of Revolutionary fame. The 
proportion of the young men in our seminaries 
who can go into the foreign field is restricted 
somewhat, as is the proportion of " fighting men " 
in the population of a country. The two propor- 
tions are not equally low perhaps ; but that of the 
possible foreign missionaries rarely if ever exceeds 
one-third of the whole number on a seminary cata- 
logue, and often falls as low as one-fourth. 

Does this seem to be a low estimate ? Look at 
the facts. A large section of these young men 
are excluded from the reckoning by considerations 
of health. Their own health, or, as probably, that 
of their chosen companions for life, settles the 
question imperatively and adversely. The ques- 
tion often is not from the Board to the student, 
" Will you go ? " but from the student to the Board, 
"May I go?" And the answer is, "No : the treas- 
ury can not take the risk of your infirm health." 

181 



182 My Portfolio. 

Another fragment, of variable size, must be 
struck from the list, for special infirmity in lin- 
guistic acquisition. One devoted missionary, after 
twenty years of service, could not preach intelli- 
gibly to the natives, and was obliged to return 
home. The churches ought not to afford many 
such experiments. Yet not all students have the 
"gift of tongues." If some of them should be 
sent abroad, some brother Aaron of whom it can 
be said, " I know that he can speak well in Arabic 
or Chinese," must be sent with each to do the 
preaching for him. 

A further fraction must be set aside, for the 
possession of some rare gift or taste which has 
fore-ordained them to some special department of 
service at home. When I go into a student's 
room, and find him reading La Place's "Mecha- 
nique Celeste " for recreation, and discover upon 
his shelf a novel chronometer of his own inven- 
tion and manufacture, and learn that he is the 
only man in Massachusetts who has calculated 
the date of a coming eclipse, I strongly suspect 
that He who created him did not intend that he 
should be a street-preacher in Canton, but predes- 
tined him to be a professor of natural philosophy 
in a Western college ; and my zeal for missions 
is not offended by his drifting into that position 
for his life's work. 

When the late Professor Putnam of Dartmouth 
College, one of the most accomplished Greek 
scholars of the country, stood on the platform at 



Foreign Missions. 183 

his graduation at Andover, more than one of his 
hearers, taking their cue from his oration, pro- 
nounced him "the young Grecian; " thus confirm- 
ing the judgment of his collegiate and theological 
instructors, that the God of nature had made him 
to be a professor of the Greek language and lit- 
erature. Unfortunately for the missionary aspira- 
tions of such men, the demand for professors of 
natural philosophy and of Greek literature among 
the Zulus is not oppressive. 

My friend Professor Churchill will pardon me 
for saying, that, when his rare elocutionary and 
histrionic gifts developed themselves at Harvard 
College and in the seminary, there was but one 
voice among sagacious educators as to the reason 
of his creation. But the need of American pro- 
fessors of elocution among the Arabs is not over- 
whelming. 

Only once in my life have I ventured to advise 
a young man to sacrifice a remarkable natural 
genius for mechanical invention to a study for the 
ministry. Unfortunately, he followed my counsel. 
His glib tongue led me to trust that he had been 
" made upright." But he " sought out many in- 
ventions." One of them was of such astounding 
originality for a county parson, that it has raised 
him to the distinction of being the only one of 
the more than three thousand students of Ando- 
ver Seminary whose services the Commonwealth 
has found it expedient for its own safety to em- 
ploy in the State Prison. "All is vanity and 
vexation of spirit." 



184 My Portfolio. 

Certain natural tastes and gifts are God's hints 
of revelation. They cannot be safely crossed. 
Mischief comes of it. Yet they divert some men 
from foreign missions, and ought to withhold some 
from the ministry altogether. The best work done 
in this world is joyous work. And joyous work 
must command a man's whole being, free from the 
friction of misplaced powers and the gasping of 
stifled tastes. 

Still another small section, but an appreciable 
one, must be omitted, for the want of adequate 
natural force for the foreign work. Time was, 
when, of an inferior preacher, the proverb ran, 
" He may do for a missionary." We are wiser than 
that now. Foreign missions demand our ablest 
men. They must stand before kings. They must 
confound learned and adroit sophists, demolish 
ancient systems of philosophy, uproot religions 
which have stood a thousand years. They are to 
be constructors of new institutions, the founders 
of churches, of colleges, of professional schools, 
of national school systems, the creators of written 
languages from their very alphabet, the origina- 
tors of a Christian literature in tongues which lack 
words for Christian thought, the pioneers, defend- 
ers, teachers, and fathers of Christian civilization 
among nations which make gods of their heathen 
ancestry. Who is sufficient for these things ? A 
young man may be very useful as the pope of a 
mountain town in New England, — yes, he may 
grace one of our metropolitan pulpits, — who could 



Foreign Missions. 185 

not be trusted to master the Tamil language, de- 
bate in it with erudite Brahmins, and build the 
foundations of christianized society in Ceylon. 

Yet another reduction of the list is made by 
the misfortune of a few young men in having been 
born to luxury and wealth — their misfortune, not 
their fault. With rare exceptions, so rare that 
they always excite commendatory remark, those 
are restricted in their range of place and service, 
who have been reared amidst the refinements and 
delicacies of an affluent metropolitan home. They 
can not " endure hardness." The cost of the en- 
durance, beyond the brief stimulus of an emer- 
gency, is very apt to be the destruction of healths 

In the first year of the civil war, when a regi- 
ment from Lowell encamped near Washington by 
the side of the New-York Seventh, famed for its 
enlistments from the wealthiest families of the me- 
tropolis, the factory operatives and farmer's sons 
volunteered to the work of the trenches, or some- 
thing similar, saying to the metropolitans, " You 
are not made for such work as this." It was true, 
and no crime of theirs: they were not made for 
it. With mutual and rare generosity, each sup- 
plemented the other, every man doing what he 
was made for. 

So in the allotments of ministerial service, with 
just exceptions enough to prove the rule, the sons 
of luxury and wealth can not be depended upon 
for rough work. Generally speaking, we do not 
look to them for recruits for foreign missionary 



186 My Portfolio. 

service. Other service they can do, and have done 
nobly. All honor to the young man, who, like the 
late Dr. Codman of Dorchester, with no necessity 
of labor for his livelihood, enters the ministry, and 
remains in it as the loved work of his life ! But 
Dr. Codman could not have done equal service as 
a missionary, even in Constantinople. 

Yet again : the candidates for the foreign service 
are reduced by considerations of domestic duty 
and pecuniary liability. One young man has a 
widowed mother or an invalid sister dependent 
upon him for society and support. Another is the 
eldest son of a large and fatherless family. A 
third, left an orphan in his infancy, has been nur- 
tured and educated by foster-parents, who now in 
their old age are dependent upon him. A fourth 
represents dozens, who have debts incurred for 
their education. They can not honestly leave the 
country till these debts are paid. Such debts 
overhang our pastors at home, for ten, even twen- 
ty years. One professor in a New-England insti- 
tution has been paying such a debt in driblets for 
thirty years. True, parsonages at home are not 
mines of gold, any more than missionary homes 
at Beirut ; but young men may more reasonably 
hope to liquidate debts in some way here than 
abroad. 

Once more : students are withheld from the for- 
eign work by the strenuous opposition of family 
and friends. A father interposes objections, with 
a power behind which gives them the force of a 



Foreign Missions. 187 

veto. A mother objects with strong crying and 
tears, which a son can not resist. The best of these 
young men are but men at best. Through college 
and seminary one has waited seven years for a 
certain Rachel, " beautiful and well favored," and 
" they seem to him but a few days for the love he 
has to her." But she, at the last moment, draws 
back from the unknown perils of exile in a foreign 
land. Unlike her namesake, she does not say, 
" Whatsoever God hath said unto thee, do." Or, 
more probably, her mother objects, who, unfortu- 
nately, does not live in Padan-aram. She breaks 
down her daughter's courage by a tearful reminder 
of the fate of Harriet Newell ; and the two Niobes 
together make our young missionary feel that he is 
a monster. Professor Stuart was an early and life- 
long friend of missions, and not a man of mawkish 
sensibilities ; yet he never could bring himself to 
advise a young man to ask, for the sake of the mis- 
sionary service, release from the marriage-engage- 
ment of his youth. Whether such obstacles as these 
ought to exist or not, they do exist : young men 
can not control them. They are often the decisive 
weight thrown into the perhaps trembling scales. 

Foreign missions, therefore, when they apply at 
the doors of a theological seminary for men, are 
compelled to pass by these various fragments of a 
graduating class. What, then, is the result? These 
fractions swell, in the aggregate, into a majority. 
The result is, that the range of choice for foreign 
missions is narrowed down to not more than one- 



188 My Portfolio. 

third, and often to one-fourth, of the whole num- 
ber of candidates for the ministry. Those who can 
go, those to whom the question is an equal one, 
those to whom it is even an open question, are but 
these few. So much the more urgent, then, is the 
appeal to them. So much the more impressive is 
the magnitude of their responsibility. So much 
the more exalted is their privilege. They are the 
few chosen ones, whose opportunity is world-wide. 

Said one of England's great statesmen, in a 
crisis of the nation's history, and with proud con- 
sciousness of a great opportunity, " I am the only 
man in England who can save this country ; and 
I can do it." May not this group of youthful 
preachers who labor under no local limitations of 
Christian service say with humbler but more rea- 
sonable exultation, " We are the only preachers of 
Christ who can carry the gospel to the heathen, 
and we can do it " ? If this limited fraction, con- 
sisting of those who can, would volunteer to the 
work from which their less favored brethren are 
excluded, our foreign missions would at least be 
saved from retrogression and disaster. Again : he 
that hath an ear to hear, let hint hear. 

But this conflict of duties to the home and the 
foreign work suggests another phase of the experi- 
ence of the young men in seminaries. It is, that 
in view of the universal cry for re-enforcements, 
and perhaps weary of the doubts of a hesitating 
conscience, they often come to the conclusion at 
last, that it can make but little difference where 



Foreign Missions. 189 

they go. Go where they may, they are but a drop 
in a maelstrom. Go where they may, they plunge 
into exigencies beyond their strength. Go where 
they may, they go under the high pressure of an 
intense conscience. Neither to the work nor them- 
selves does it seem to matter much which way 
they turn their steps. 

Said Gen. Howard at Gettysburg, to a squad of 
stragglers who were scrupulously hunting for their 
regimental colors, " Fall in, boys, fall in under the 
first flag you come to: there's the enemy: you 
can't go wrong." So, in the turmoil of this great 
moral conflict, this little squad of young men some- 
times lose sight of "departments" and " fields," 
of east and west and south. The " here " and 
" there " become insignificant. They are apt at 
last to settle the question in the mood of feeling, 
that, if they " fall in " anywhere, they " can't go 
wrong." Yet "the first flag they come to" means, 
perhaps, the vacant pulpit of the church whose 
spire is visible from their study-windows. 

Is not the conclusion of the whole matter, then, 
the policy of increasing the numbers of candidates 
for the ministry, and of those especially who seek 
the ministry, not for its metropolitan and suburb- 
an service, but for the sake of its missionary privi- 
leges ? Let us go to the colleges and the churches 
for missionary candidates. Let men be drawn from 
the church to the college, and from the college to 
the seminary, for the sole purpose of preaching 
Christ as missionaries only, and they will be the 
more likely to stick to their first choice. 



190 My Portfolio. 

Such men make the best missionaries too. The 
very best are those who never had other ambi- 
tions. The charm of David Scudder's brief mis- 
sionary life was due to the fact that he was born 
to it. He never had another choice of his life's 
work. He had no youthful aspirations to surren- 
der. In after-life he had no regretful memories. 
His whole history was cumulative towards one end. 
Hence the concentration of his aim. Hence his 
joy in his work. Hence, too, the fascination of his 
sway over others and the resplendent promise of 
his manhood. Such men are the missionary powers, 
wherever they are, — in the home, in the church, 
in the college, in the seminary, in the field. Let 
us multiply such young men, and the future of 
missions at home and abroad will be progressive 
and triumphant. 



XXI. 

CONGBEGATIONALISTS AND PEESBYTEKIANS : A 
PLEA POK UNION. 

CoKGREGATiONAL^m and Presbyteriamsra are 
natural foes, but Congregationalists and Presby- 
terians are naturally one. Such is the difference 
between isms and the men and women who work 
them in real life. Has not the time come around 
again in the cycle of history, when the unity of 
these two great bodies of Christians should be 
expressed more palpably to the world's vision? 
Perhaps not by the resumption of abrogated 
"plans of union," certainly not by the resurrec- 
tion of any thing resonant with the echoes of 
ancient warfare. But in modes congruous with 
existing modes of thought, and with no loss to 
the individuality of either, may not these two 
wings of the Lord's hosts cross over to each other, 
and march abreast ? 

They are one in their history. The early evan- 
gelizing of this country scarcely knew a difference 
between them. They professed the same standards 
of belief; they revered the same great names in 
the history of the old countries; they inherited 

191 



192 My Portfolio. 

the same traditions from the Reformation. In this 
country, President Edwards represents a class of 
leaders in both churches, who to this day are as 
venerable to one as to the other. So late as the 
time of the founding of Andover Seminary, its 
charter decreed that its professors for ever should 
be ministers in either the Congregational or the 
Presbyterian communion. That provision was a 
faithful exponent of the Congregationalism of that 
day. Our Congregational fathers never dreamed 
of the time when their successors could not cross 
the border into the Presbyterian fold, and when 
Presbyterians could not reciprocate the fellowship, 
without a stigma upon their loyalty. The divid- 
ing line was practically as invisible as the equator. 

Hence grew up that grand union of these two 
bodies in missionary and benevolent activity, 
which has been the glory of our time. When the 
seminary at Princeton was founded, it was be- 
lieved to be, and it was, only an extension of the 
work begun at Andover. Antagonism between 
the two was never broached. It has required a 
half-century of denominational discipline to con- 
vince the rank and file of the two churches that 
they need any other almoner of their foreign mis- 
sionary bounty than the American Board. Some 
of them are not yet convinced. Many look back 
with longing to the ancient brotherhood. Is it 
decreed that those days have departed never to 
return ? 

The two churches are still one in their doctrinal 



Congregationalists and Presbyterians. 193 

faith. Since the re-union of the two branches of 
the Presbyterian body (disrupted in 1837 ), and 
since the re-affirmation of the Westminster Con- 
fession by the National Council of Congregation- 
alists at Plymouth, it may be fairly presumed that 
theological diversities need never again alienate 
these denominations from each other. Their faith 
is one. The orthodoxy of Presbyterians has never 
been questioned in New England ; and the New- 
England theology, once suspected and denounced, 
has been substantially indorsed by the Presbyte- 
rian Church. By a " thirty-years ' war" it has es- 
tablished its right to he under the Presbyterian 
banner. No man will ever again be arraigned 
before the Presbyterian courts for holding the 
theology of Albert Barnes and Lyman Beecher. 
That question was settled when Albert Barnes 
was welcomed back into the re-united Presbyte- 
rian Church without a retraction of any word he 
ever preached or published. With that question 
was settled, also, the theological soundness of the 
Congregational clergy as judged by Presbyterian 
standards ; for the Westminster Confession is a 
common standard to both. The faith of the two, 
I repeat, is one. No theological grounds remain 
for alienation between them. No doctrinal reasons 
exist why the clergy of the two denominations 
should not cross and recross the border, in the 
interchange of pastorates, as freely as in the days 
of Dr. Griffin and Dr. Skinner. 

In administrative policy \ also, the two churches are 



194 My Portfolio. 

essentially the same. If one is a trifle more con- 
servative than the other, and the other is a trifle 
more radical than the one, the difference is not 
repellent : it is only sufficient to render each the 
natural complement of the other. Each would be 
more efficient in union with the other. Both are 
progressive conservatives; both, are conservative 
reformers. The two ideal foci of all healthy 
growth represented by the words " conservatism " 
and "progress" shine as luminously in the one 
ellipse as in the other. Presbyterians are not 
Bourbons; Congregationalists are not Jacobins. 
Both are Girondists. He must be the common 
enemy of both who would guillotine either. 

Even their forms of church polity, so divergent 
in theory, are not schismatically asunder in prac- 
tice. Any form of church government is what 
the spirit is which energizes it. I know a Congre- 
gational church in Boston — who does not? — in 
which affairs are as presbyterially administered 
as they ever were in the First Presbyterian Church 
of Baltimore under the trenchant sway of Dr. 
Breckinridge. The First Presbyterian Church of 
Philadelphia, under Albert Barnes, was as congre- 
gationally governed in spirit as any one of a hun- 
dred churches, taken at random, in Massachusetts. 

The two systems of church polity have been 
modifying each other, the one consolidating and 
the other liquefying, for two hundred years. In 
the result, both are developed, in the spirit of the 
New Testament and of common sense, more sym- 



Congregationalists and Presbyterians. 195 

metrically than if they had not been historically 
intermingled. The drift towards union of the two 
denominations is so powerful from other causes, 
that church polity alone can not keep them long 
asunder, except in times when denominational 
blood is at fever-heat. Even then, the hot blood 
inflames the few, not all. The neighings of eccle- 
siastical war-horses who scent the battle from afar 
must not be mistaken for the equal breathings of 
Christian aspiration by the men and women who 
make up these hosts of God's elect. Their thought 
of each other is always and profoundly fraternal. 

The two denominations are one, also, in respect to 
the class of minds to which they appeal successfully 
for support. All the great denominations of 
Christendom are founded upon certain radical 
diversities of mental structure. They have not 
sprung up at hap-hazard. They are not the fated 
outgrowths of history. They have grown out of 
the same differences of human nature which make 
history. Shrewd observers of character often 
think they can detect in a good man's countenance 
the expression of the religious sect to which he 
ought to belong. Do we not all practice thus a 
physiognomy which is not all guess-work ? 

Among these diversities of mental structure 
there is one, which, for the want of a better title 
adapted to the present purpose, may be termed 
the Calvinistic order of mind. That is to say, it 
takes naturally to the Calvinistic class of creeds 
and methods of working. There are Calvinistic 



196 My Portfolio. 

natures, and there are Arminian natures. Under 
circumstances evenly favorable to both these de- 
velopments of thought, a very large class of men 
will choose one, and eschew the other, by an in- 
stinct as certain as that which induces bees to 
swarm, and beavers to build dams. 

The Calvinistic order of mind is inclined to pro- 
found views of truth. It is contemplative before 
it is active in its religious tastes. It is equable in 
religious emotion, reverent and calm in its modes 
of worship, given to looking before and after, to 
asking for and seeing the reasons of things, yet 
imbued with a strong element of faith, which is 
not staggered by beliefs which border hard on 
contradictions. Withal, it is a constructive order 
of mind. It works in dead earnest, and works out 
systems of things. It builds for permanence, and 
looks a long way ahead for results. If you want 
to make any thing eternal in human affairs, you 
must build into it, and especially under it, a very 
large proportion of the Calvinistic elements. 

To this order of mind, several Christian denom- 
inations appeal chiefly for support, of which the 
two most eminent in English and American his- 
tory are the Presbyterian and the Congregational. 
This single point of unity between them is a more 
imperial power over them both than all their dif- 
ferences put together. Start the two contempora- 
neously in a new community, as is now so often 
done on our Western frontier, and they must live, 
if at all, upon precisely the same elements of so- 



Congregationalists and Presbyterians. 197 

ciety. They must compete for the same families ; 
they must invite the same leadership ; and in the 
result they must develop in that community the 
same kind of religious forces. 

That law of our religious history by which Con- 
gregationalists migrating into Presbyterian com- 
munities have so largely fallen into the Presbj^terian 
ranks, lies very deep in the natural affinities of the 
two sects. It is no sign of disloyalty. It is illib- 
eral to question their right to do it, or to censure 
them for doing it. They obey a law of religious 
similitude which is more potent and valuable to 
Christian character than any attachment to church 
polity can be or ought to be. My father, in New 
England, lived in a wooden house painted white, 
with green blinds, as his father did before him. 
Shall I, therefore, be held untrue to his memory, 
and faithless to his home, if, when I remove into a 
clay country, destitute of timber land, I choose to 
live in a brick or stone house not painted at all ? 

With so many and so strong lines of gravitation 
between two great powers of Christendom, why 
should not the policy of both invite union rather 
than schism ? Does not the new spirit of union 
among all evangelical denominations, and the new 
pressure from without which is crowding them 
together, demand this policy specially between 
these two? With what consistency can we cry 
aloud and spare not, as we are doing to our Epis- 
copal and Baptist brethren, who constitute the 
most impregnable fortresses — the Ehrenbreitstein 



198 My Portfolio. 

and Strasbourg — of religious seclusion, if we will 
not ourselves embrace each other, when we have 
so little in our fundamental convictions to sepa- 
rate us ? 



XXII. 

CONGKEGATIONALISTS AND PKESBYTEKIANS : 
METHODS OF UNION. 

How can the policy of these two denominations 
towards each other be liberalized without sacrifice 
of principles sacred to either? I answer briefly, 
in the following ways, if in no other. 

1. In establishing new churches in the Western 
frontier States, let us more generously yield to 
the law of majorities. Abandon the wretched 
policy of building two churches for Presbyterian 
and Congregational weaklings to starve in and to 
snarl in at each other because both are starving. 
Build the one church, and let the majority have 
it; the minority giving a cordial support. A 
Union Church, under such circumstances, does 
not meet the case. Indeed, a Union Church is a 
misnomer anywhere. There is something comical 
in the innocence with which a Congregational 
deacon should say, as no respectable deacon ever 
did say, to a Presbyterian elder, " Come now, let 
us have no presbytery and no council, but let us 
come together and manage our own affairs in our 
own way, in a Union Church." We must not 

199 



200 My Portfolio. 

expect our Presbyterian friends to be so conven- 
iently short-sighted as not to see that that is Con- 
gregationalism distilled to the very " proof-spirit " 
of independency. Nobody wants that, unless it 
be the Plymouth Church of Brooklyn. No, not 
that for us. Let us fairly give in to the law of 
majorities. 

2. Why not encourage, rather than resist, the 
mutual transfer of the ministry between Congre- 
gational and Presbyterian pulpits? The Old 
Brick Church of New York has seldom had a 
pastor not trained in Andover Seminary. Three 
times in succession, within twenty years, it has 
invited to its pastorship men trained in Congre- 
gational schools, and thorough-bred in Congrega- 
tional traditions. At one time every professor in 
the Union Theological Seminary of New York, 
save possibly one, was a man of Congregational 
birth or training ; all but two had been students 
in Andover Seminary ; and three of them were 
once Congregational pastors. Princeton College 
and Seminary, too, have men, once Congregational 
pastors, among their professors. Why is not this as 
it should be ? 

When, on the other hand, the Central Church 
of Boston and the Broadway Tabernacle of New 
York invite Presbyterians to become their pastors, 
when the American Board calls Dr. Treat from a 
Presbyterian church to be its secretary, and when 
Andover Seminary invites the Presbyterian Dr. 
Skinner to its rhetorical chair, why is not this as 



Congregationalists and Presbyterians. 201 

well? Why not break down and bury all iron 
barriers between the two sects ? Let the separa- 
tion be but by a willow network. More even : let 
it be but an invisible line, which the ministry on 
either side may cross and recross as unconsciously 
as they would cross the line of the meridian in a 
Cunard steamer. What if the result should be 
that Congregationalism would give more than it 
would receive? What does that signify, except 
that it has more to give of such materials as the 
church universal wants ? The most creative and 
self-diffusive good that is done in this world is 
that of which the doers do not get the credit to 
themselves, but in the doing of which they are 
buried under other names. Is not just that the 
history of Congregationalism, indeed, of New- 
England institutions generally ? And is it not 
the glory of any good thing, that such should be 
its mission for the present ? The resurrection is 
to come by and by. 

3. Why not apply to church-extension by these 
two denominations in old communities the same 
law of comity which foreign missionary boards 
recognize in their treatment of each other ? They 
hold themselves bound in honor not to interfere 
with each other, not to build on each other's 
foundation, not to disturb in the heathen mind 
each other's prestige. When the ritualists of Eng- 
land sent a bishop, gorgeous with ecclesiastical 
regalia, to tempt the Hawaiians from their alle- 
giance to their Presbyterian and Congregational 



202 My Portfolio. 

fathers, the American Board protested against it as 
an outrage ; and all liberal Episcopalians in Eng- 
land and America seconded the protest. This was 
as it should have been. The great missionary or- 
ganizations recognize each other, not as rivals, but 
as friends ; not as competitors, but as co-workers. 
Each leaves to another its chosen field. Neither 
insults another by presuming that its work needs 
to be done over again ; but all rejoice in the suc- 
cess of each as being the success of every other. 
This has become the recognized law of missionary 
comity, as well established as any law of nations. 
Wiry, then, is not the principle just as sound 
and wise when applied to church extension by 
Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the older 
States, where both have here and there a history 
of success, and a prestige, which it is an evil to 
disturb ? Why should a Presbyterian church ever 
have existed in New England? Why should a 
Congregational church have ever been planted in 
Pennsylvania ? Nothing has been gained by either 
which could not have been more economically 
gained by the dominant denomination first in pos- 
session of the field and of the hearts of the people. 
There is always more or less of needless waste of 
religious forces, when a denomination must work 
with few and feeble and unknown churches, by 
the side of another rich and great and compact, 
and with a splendid history behind it, and yet so 
nearly like its feeble competitor, that the world 
can see no valid reason for the competition. Na- 



Congregationalists and Presbyterians. 203 

tional traditions, pride of ancestry, attachment to 
early reminiscences, are not sufficient reasons for 
starting counter-currents of religious sympathy. 
Said Napoleon to the French Directory, when 
they talked of sending another general into Italy 
to co-operate with him in the command, " Do not 
disturb the unity of military power in Italy. One 
bad general is better than two good ones." The 
event proved that he was right. When will the 
Church be as wise in its policy of denominational 
extension? Is it to be never till Romish unity 
by its terrific conquests drives us to it? 

I know very well that much may be said on 
the more narrowly and intensely sectarian side of 
these questions. But the drift of the public mind 
runs deep and strong towards the submerging of 
minor diversities among Christians who are essen- 
tially one. God has a meaning in this imperative 
demand for union. It is his work that the world 
wearies of Christian alienations. It is a hint of 
his will that men of the world shrug their shoul- 
ders at the whole idea of competition among 
Christian churches. 

If I do not misread the page of Providence, 
Christian union must be served chiefly in two 
ways. In the first place, those sects, which, like 
the Episcopal and the Baptist, have intrenched 
themselves behind the walls of one or two dogmas 
which the rest of the church universal can not ac- 
cept, have a work of simple surrender before them. 
Those two non-essentials — close communion and 



204 My Portfolio. 

apostolical succession — must be given up. They 
are foredoomed. Those two denominations, be it 
said in all kindness, can never do much for the 
cause of Christian unity, till the doom of those 
two dogmas is seen and accepted. In the second 
place, other sects, like the two discussed in these 
pages, which in faith, in policy, in history, and 
in character, are so nearly one that a century has 
scarcely taught the world the difference between 
them, must become one in every thing that can 
excite in them the sense of alienation, or that can 
make the world sensible of the spectacle of com- 
petition. Are we not called upon therefore, by a 
voice which we may not ignore with impunity, to 
reconsider questions which our sectarian wisdom, 
as we have thought, had settled for ever ? Such 
union as is here contemplated between these two 
great branches of the Church would inevitably be 
the precursor of other and grander advances to- 
ward the fulfillment of our Lord's prayer, " that 
they all may be one." 



XXIII. 

THE PEEACHING OF ALBEET BAENES. 

The effects of his early preaching resembled 
those of the later preaching of Chalmers at Kil- 
many. He was thoroughly possessed with the 
spirit of the early revivals of New England. His 
preaching was always expectant of revivals. Yet 
he worked and lived at the antipodes from every 
thing like ranting excitement. He relied largely 
on doctrinal preaching for the instrumental forces 
of such awakenings. One of the most fruitful 
revivals that blessed his ministry followed a series 
of discourses on the doctrine of divine decrees. 
The sermon for which he was first arraigned for 
heresy was a doctrinal epitome of the whole sys- 
tem of grace. It was entitled "The Way of 
Salvation," and was afterwards expanded into a 
volume of thirty-six discourses bearing the same 
title. He preached it for the instruction of a 
large class of recent converts. Yet it never seemed 
to occur to his prosecutors that there was any 
thing incongruous in calling him down from a 
powerful work of the grace of God to answer to 
their Book of Discipline. 

205 



206 My Portfolio. 

At Philadelphia, whither he removed from his 
brief pastorate at Morristown, the same scenes 
were repeated. The whoop of " Heresy ! " was 
redoubled, and again responded to by the outpour- 
ing of the Holy Spirit. " The Lord answered Job 
out of the whirlwind." There was something 
electric in the current of his early ministrations 
in Philadelphia. They produced a silent upheaval 
of the elements in that venerable church. Pro- 
fessing Christians of long standing gave up their 
religious hopes, under the searching and sifting 
ministry of the young pastor. His three published 
sermons, entitled " Enemies of the Cross of Christ," 
I know to have been prepared and preached under 
the conviction that certain well-known members 
of his church were unregenerate men, for whose 
souls he must give account. He preached to 
such hearers in the style of " Edwards on the 
Affections." 

Some of his eminent parishioners left the church, 
and sought repose elsewhere from his severe fidel- 
ity. One, a lawyer, sought refuge in the Episcopal 
Church, avowing as his reason, " I must go where 
I can enjoy my religion : Mr. Barnes makes me feel 
that I haven't any." In another instance, a mem- 
ber of the church, after years had elapsed, thus 
described the effect of Mr. Barnes's early sermons 
upon him, as I recall it, substantially : " I was 
convicted of sin as I had never been before. I 
saw that my old hope was a false one ; and oh, 
how I hated the man for so breaking up my peace ! 



The Preaching of Albert Barnes. 207 

If I had had any doubt of my lost state, the 
enmity of my heart to him was enough to unde- 
ceive me. I would have dismissed him in a week 
if I could ; but I dared not say a word, the people 
loved him so. And so I fumed and raged, carry- 
ing hell within me, till the grace of God broke me 
down. I owe my soul to Albert Barnes." This 
gentleman expressed his belief that there were 
others in the church whose religious character 
underwent a similar change. I have some reason 
to think that Mr. Barnes's views of the evidences 
of conversion underwent some modification subse- 
quently ; but he always spoke with great respect 
of " Edwards on the Affections," and his preach- 
ing to Christians was often in the heart-searching 
vein of that book. 

If I were to sum up in brief the resources of 
his power in the pulpit, I should say that they 
were centered in good sense, good will, and good 
courage. He was not a genius in any of the com- 
mon acceptations of that word. He had neither 
the brilliancy nor the eccentricity of genius in 
his preaching. His pulpit was burdened by no 
self-contradictions, no flings at creeds, no ranting 
about character as opposed to orthodoxy, and no 
fogs which muddle hearers as to what he did 
believe. He did not love the pyrotechnic school 
of pulpit eloquence. Both in matter and manner 
he was one of the calmest men I ever heard. He 
stood in the pulpit like a statue, rarely moving 
any thing but his lips and his eyelids; yet for 



208 My Portfolio. 

power to feel his way inward to the heart-strings 
of hearers, and play upon them at will "to the 
Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders," I have 
never heard his equal. His sermons furnished an 
admirable illustration of his own classification of 
the theologies: that "there is a theology which 
can, and a theology which can not, be preached" 
He tested all systems by the pulpit. Like the 
greatest theologians of all ages, and the truest, in- 
spired and uninspired, he was first a preacher, then 
a theologian. His was therefore emphatically the 
theology which can be preached, — a sensible, self- 
consistent, well-poised, and large-hearted theology ; 
biblical in its proportions as well as in its princi- 
ples, and therefore consonant with the necessary 
beliefs of men. It had all the elements of a work- 
ing theology ; and he built it up, and buttressed it 
and adorned it with an inexhaustible fund of 
biblical thought. He preached it with inimitable 
candor and loveliness of spirit, yet with a still 
courage which feared the face of no mortal man. 

I never knew another man who could pack so 
much thought into a sermon, and yet popularize 
it all so thoroughly that all classes of intellect 
could understand it, and all hearts feel it. I have 
never heard another preacher who could say such 
severe things without a word of splenetic censure. 
He resembled John Foster in his power of " pump- 
ing," as Foster used to call it, profound thought 
up to the surface of popular speech ; yet he did 
not, like Foster, drive his audience out of doors 



The Preaching of Albert Barnes. 209 

in the doing of it. He would preach a sacramen- 
tal sermon to his church in the morning, an ex- 
temporaneous sermon to his sabbath school in the 
afternoon, and a sermon to medical students in 
the evening of the same clay ; and all three dis- 
courses seemed strung on the same thread of phi- 
losophical and biblical suggestion, yet all equally 
intelligible and interesting to the hearers. His 
doctrinal sermons, of which students in theology 
took notes, as of lectures in systematic divinity, — 
they were so clear, so logical, so compact, and 
so exhaustive, — were borrowed and copied by in- 
valid ladies for the strength and good cheer they 
gave in the sick-room. His versatility of adapta- 
tion was something wonderful. To a looker-on it 
became a study, like the secret marvels of vegeta- 
tion, which astonishes us by its power to do so 
many things so well ; and like that, also, was his 
working in its stillness. 

His courage was of the unconscious sort. It 
was no exultant foresight of victory, but the art- 
less boldness of a child. Blustering men were 
apt to mistake his silence for timidity, because it 
was his way to let such men have their soliloquy 
to themselves. His book on American slavery 
was a thesaurus to the abolitionists for twenty 
years ; yet their unchristian bravado repelled him 
from co-operation with them. He often said, " If 
a good cause could be killed, antislavery would 
be so, by the intemperance of its friends." But 
he preached the substance of his book to his peo- 



210 My Portfolio. 

pie at a time when millions of property sat along 
the aisles of his church, coined out of slave-labor 
on cotton and rice plantations. He did it with 
the air of one who did not for a moment conceive 
it possible to do any thing else. He was a prophet 
of the Lord, sent to give that message, and he gave 
it. That was the revealed duty of the hour, and 
he did it. His more timid friends trembled for 
the result, but not he ; and I doubt whether any- 
body ever ventured to suggest the fear to him. 
Nobody dared to organize an opposition to him on 
that ground ; yet I often heard the wish expressed 
that he would keep his antislavery to his books, 
and not speak it in the pulpit. He was not the 
man to hoodwink his conscience in that way. In 
those days I never heard a sermon from him on 
the doctrine of the atonement, which he did not 
mould into a hot shot against slavery. 

I shall never forget one occasion on which he 
thus turned the battery of doctrinal theology 
against what he did not scruple to denounce as 
"the accursed system," on which "Heaven could 
never smile." Be it remembered that his hearers 
were soundly orthodox believers in the West- 
minster Confession, and specially in the central 
truth of the atonement ; yet among them were old 
slaveholders, as hearty believers in the necessity 
of " the evil " by which their property had been 
amassed, and the houses of their children had been 
built, and beautified with all that money could 
purchase, and culture could desire. It was at a 



The Preaching of Albert Barnes. 211 

time — in those days Philadelphia scarcely ever 
knew any different time — when the fight waxed 
hot between the friends and the foes of slavehold- 
ing. The pulpits were not few in which silence 
reigned on the whole subject. It is now believed 
that the "irrepressible conflict" had more to do 
than any thing else with the rupture of the Pres- 
byterian Church. Some preachers of high repute 
had words of censure for the abolitionists only. 
Mobs were rampant against free speech and " free 
niggers " alike. William Lloyd Garrison's life was 
not safe in Pennsylvania Hall. The firemen were 
forbidden to play upon that hall when it was in 
flames. The provost of the university apologized 
blandly for the murderers of Lovejoy at Alton. 
Probably no other Northern city contained so 
many emigrant slaveholders from the South, and 
so many runaway slaves ; and no other was, there- 
fore, so difficult a spot in which to stand up and 
speak for the slave to a " respectable audience." 
But it was precisely the spot, and those were, 
above all others, the surroundings, in which Mr. 
Barnes could do no otherwise than put to hazard 
his reputation and his influence in words of truth 
and soberness. His theme on the occasion re- 
ferred to was, "The love of God in the gift of 
a Saviour." 

He first showed that salvation originated in 
the love of God; then, that it was the grandest 
expression of love of which a finite mind could 
conceive; and, finally, that it was planned and 



212 My Portfolio. 

executed for the world. In the first two-thirds 
of the discourse, he interwove argument and 
illustration, and emotive appeal, and most tender 
soliloquy, till the whole house was hushed, and 
many eyes were swimming at the thought of the 
love of an Infinite Heart for a lost soul. The 
inherited faith, and the matured convictions, and 
the personal experiences, of his hearers, were all 
committed to swell the current of sympathy with 
the preacher, which evidently held the assembly 
fast. Every eye was fixed upon him ; every breath 
was mute ; the very children looked up, awed by 
the presence of an unseen power, as his melliflu- 
ous voice rolled out like the vibrations of a bell 
his sonorous and welling periods. Then, when 
the still excitement, which nothing else produces 
like the preaching of the gospel, seemed to be 
at its height, — as if human feeling could rise no 
higher, and could bear no more, — he lifted up 
his eyes, and glancing around till every corner of 
the house seemed as if penetrated by the light of 
God's countenance, and summoned to hear God's 
words, with the single sharp perpendicular How 
of the right hand (one of the only two ges- 
tures he ever used) he said, " And I love to feel, 
and will feel — it makes me love the gospel 
more, and the Saviour more — that for the black 
man of Africa he died, whether sunk in debase- 
ment on his native shore ... or whether borne 
a captive across the ocean, and bound down by 
ignorance and toil in Christian lands. He is a 



The Preaching of Albert Barnes. 213 

man, an immortal man, a redeemed man, and not 
a chattel or a thing. Christ died not for chattels 
and for things : he died for souls, for men, for im- 
mortal minds, for those who may yet burst every 
shackle and every bond, and range the world of 
glory as immortal freemen. . . . He who makes 
an arrangement by which any class of men is ex- 
cluded from the gospel invades the prerogative of 
God, prohibits what he commands, and exposes 
himself to the wrath of the Almighty. Any sys- 
tem of things on earth which prevents the fair 
promulgation of the gospel is a violation of the 
arrangements of Heaven, and will sooner or later 
meet the curse of the Most High." 

The effect was of a singular sort, such as I have 
never witnessed before or since in a magnetized 
assembly. It was not startling. There was no 
outcry, no springing to the feet, no speaking, and 
responses of admiring eyes. But the stillness sud- 
denly deepened like the silence of the elements 
which precedes an earthquake ; while a weight 
like that of an Atlantic tidal wave seemed to roll 
in, as if ingulfing every man, woman, and child 
under the dread anathema. For a moment we 
all seemed to lie there, buried " deeper than ever 
plummet sounded." Then came a positive physi- 
cal relief to eyes and ears and lungs and heart, 
as if we rose again into our native air, when the 
preacher fell back into his beautiful colloquial 
style and tones, like the gentle pattering of the 
farewell shower when the storm is over. I have 



214 My Portfolio. 

heard many sermons on the atonement since that 
day, and many diatribes against oppression, but 
never any thing like that. That has always been 
my beau ideal of doctrinal preaching. Many times 
during the war of the rebellion that prophet's 
voice sounded again in my ears : " Sooner or 
later, the curse of the Most High ! Sooner or later, 
the curse of the Most High ! " 

It was difficult for an appreciative listener to 
Mr. Barnes to be sensible, at the time, of any fault 
in his preaching, such was his winning magnetism 
over a hearer, and so nearly faultless seemed the 
personal character of the man. The power of per- 
son was supreme among the factors of his influ- 
ence in the pulpit. I doubt whether any idolized 
pastor was ever more hallowed than he in the 
judgment of his parishioners, after his dominion 
among them had had time to consolidate itself. 
" I have known him now for twelve years," said 
one of his elders, " and I never detected in him 
a sin or a folly." Such was the general feeling 
at the time of which I write ; and this reverent 
affection for the man reduplicated the power of 
his pulpit. 

But there were two things, which, it seems to 
me, were evils in their bearing upon his preaching. 
One was his own infidel experience in his early 
manhood. He made no secret of this. He often 
spoke of it with modest sadness, deprecating its 
effect upon his Christian character ; and it was a 
favorite effort with him to make his own life in 



The Preaching of Albert Barnes. 215 

that respect a warning to other young men. He 
used to say, " After twenty years of, as I hope, 
Christian life, my mind is not yet clear of infidel 
habits of thinking and feeling." No one else 
would have suspected this, if he had not disclosed 
it ; but the effect of that passage in his life which 
was perceptible to others, though not to him, was 
that it inclined him to make excessive conces- 
sions to infidelity, and to preach disproportion- 
ately upon subjects bearing upon the phases of 
the infidel argument. His candor to opponents 
sometimes made more impression than his argu- 
ment against them. In his eagerness to concede 
every thing that could be fairly claimed, he some- 
times granted more than could be proved, and 
the after-process of building up his faith did not 
always undo the evil. At times, also, the pro- 
portions of his preaching were more largely in 
the line of Christian polemics than the experience 
of his hearers needed. He built upward less 
than he laid the foundations for. 

The other thing which sometimes affected his 
preaching unfortunately was a peculiarity of his 
temperament, which I have not seen noticed in 
any of the published comments upon his life and 
works. It was a morbid sensitiveness to suffering. 
The spectacle of this in others keenly wounded 
and depressed him ; and the thought of it, as per- 
vading so largely this world and another in God's 
universe, often appalled him. Hence his remark- 
able " Confessions," in his sermon entitled " God 



216 My Portfolio. 

worthy of Confidence," which have made Univer- 
salists and infidels exultant over his theology. " I 
confess," he says, " when I look upon a world 
of sinners and of sufferers, upon death-beds and 
graveyards, upon the world of woe filled with 
hosts to suffer for ever . . . and when I feel that 
God only can save them, and yet that he does 
not do it, I am struck dumb. It is all dark, 
dark, dark, to my soul, and I can not disguise it. 
In the distress and anguish of my own spirit I 
confess that I see no light whatever. I have 
never seen a particle of light thrown on these 
subjects that has given a moment's ease to my 
tortured mind." 

These are appalling words from a Christian 
pulpit. One can not wonder that infidelity takes 
advantage of them to the discredit of the faith 
which nurtured them. But to understand them 
we must give large room to the deep and gentle 
sensibilities of the preacher. Suffering was a more 
profound and portentous reality to his soul than 
to the average of men. The world of despair was 
a ghastly anomaly in God's universe. He preached 
it without flinching ; but those sermons were sub- 
dued and plaintive in their tone, — the wail of an 
agonized spirit. He had none of the hardness of 
an athlete in his make, but the gentleness of a 
woman, rather, whom " the winds of heaven " had 
never been permitted to " visit roughly." When 
his life-long friend, Matthias Baldwin, lay upon his 
death-bed, Mr. Barnes threw his arms around his 



The Preaching of Albert Barnes. 217 

neck, and wept aloud. His loving nature recoiled 
from a Draconian theory of retribution. He was 
once exhausted almost to fainting by the preach- 
ing of a sermon upon future punishment. I never 
saw him shed a tear ; but I have no doubt that 
he did weep, often and bitterly, over this world's 
anguish and the lost world's horrors. 

This sensitiveness to suffering disclosed itself 
in many minor ways. He could take no pleasure 
in the recreations of sportsmen. He shrunk from 
angling, and doubted the moral rectitude of it as 
an amusement. He felt at times a mortal aver- 
sion to the sea : to him it was an immense burial- 
place. He thought of it as the maelstrom of 
wrecked and burning ships, with their helpless 
freight of men and women and children and babes. 
When his physician advised a voyage for his sal- 
vation from threatened blindness, he encountered 
the perils of the Atlantic with extreme reluc- 
tance. Before embarking, he discussed with his 
friends the point of casuistry, — whether a man 
might rightly seek death by drowning to escape 
death by fire. It is a token of the genial rela- 
tions existing between him and his friend Dr. 
Brainerd, that the latter tried to amuse his de- 
jected spirits by telling him that he need not fear 
either ; for " a man who was born to be hanged 
would never be drowned." 

While this peculiarity of his temperament did 
not amount to any thing unmanly in the common 
vocations of life, I think it did sometimes affect 



218 My Portfolio. 

the fiber of his faith, and the tone of his preach- 
ing, on divine retribution. He could not preach 
it exultingly. The argument from reason in de- 
fense of it made no impression on him whatever. 
He accepted it solely as a revelation from God. 
It was to him a profound and insoluble mystery, 
into the philosophy of which he had no heart to 
inquire. 

These defects, however, if they must be called 
such, were but spots on the sun. As a whole, 
his pulpit was a burning and shining light to the 
Church of God. But few such illumine her his- 
tory. For myself, I esteem it a privilege to place 
on record my own grateful sense of obligation to 
him, such as I owe to no other man but one. 



XXIV. 

A VACATION WITH DE. BUSHNELL. 

Some years ago it was my privilege to spend 
the major part of a summer vacation with this 
rare man in the Green Mountains. Some impres- 
sions which I received of his mental structure, 
and of his theology, and of his religious charac- 
ter, deserve recording. 

He was visibly worn out by disease. His coun- 
tenance bore the look of distant yet fast-coming 
dissolution, which but one malady gives to the 
human eye. Yet he was as full of courage, as full 
of life and of his life's work, as he could have 
been when thirty years younger. Few men have 
ever impressed me as being so electric with vital- 
ity at all points as he was. He was an enthusiast 
in his love of rural sights and sounds and sports, 
in little things as brimful as in great things. He 
seemed the beau ideal of a live man. The su- 
premacy of mind over body was something won- 
derful. One could not but feel a new assurance 
of the soul's immortality in witnessing the easy 
and unconscious power with which his spirit 
swayed the physical frame which was secretly 

219 



220 My Portfolio. 

enticing him down to the grave. For seventeen 
years he had kept death at bay : and, at the time 
I speak of, medical diagnosis revealed that but 
one lung supported his remnant of life ; yet that 
semi-form of life seemed equal to the prime of 
many a hale man. The abandon of his recrea- 
tions in the bowling-alley, where he was a boy 
again, and his theological talks of a Sunday even- 
ing-, told the same story. " Dying, and behold we 
live," recurred once and again in listening to 
the conversations in which he was sure to be the 
center and the seer. 

I have never heard from any other man, in the 
same length of time, so much of original remark. 
There is but little original thought in this world, 
at the best. The most learned of us have often 
the least of it. At forty-five men are apt to find 
this world, as the author of Ecclesiastes did, very 
stale. " The thing which hath been, it is that 
which shall be." Only now and then a thinker 
comes along, like Coleridge or Isaac Taylor, so 
full of originality that he creates an atmosphere 
laden with the spices of other worlds around him ; 
and for that the wise men of the East call him 
" eccentric." They bring incense to him from afar, 
nevertheless. Prophets and apostles are always 
eccentric men. Doubtless we shall find Gabriel an 
eccentric spirit, if we ever get within sight and 
hearing of him. Somebody must do the work of 
the wise men ; but for spurring us out of our jog- 
trot, and for revealing our wings to our own con- 



A Vacation with Dr. BushnelL 221 

sciousness, and for teaching us our first flights, 
give us more of the eccentric men. Rev. Dr. 
Kirk once told me that the most stimulating 
books to him were almost all heresy. 

One of the eccentric but winged spirits was Dr. 
Bushnell. It was not his way to talk for the sake 
of colloquial courtesy. He never made conver- 
sation. He would not assent to your say out of 
conventional politeness. From no courtly presence 
on earth could he ever have backed out with meek 
obeisance. Nothing was more natural to him than 
to write letters of advice to popes. His common 
talks were varied by similar quaint ways. If you 
said a silly thing or a dull one, you must carry it : 
he would not help you out of it. If he had him- 
self nothing worth saying to utter, he kept silent. 
He could make silence mean more than the speech 
of other men. Awkward pauses would sometimes 
happen. But, when he spoke, all ears were alert 
with the assurance that they should hear some- 
thing which they would not willingly lose. The 
cloud in the western sky, the shadow on Bread 
Loaf Mountain, the song of the oriole in the 
apple-tree, the trout in the brook, the clover in 
the fields, the habits of the mountain-ash, were 
all hints to his mind of something different from 
their suggestions to other observers. Language, 
too, in his talk, as in his books, he used often not 
as other men. 

One could not long discourse with him, even on 
the common things and in the undress of life, 



222 My Portfolio. 

without discovering the secret of his solitude in 
the theological world. That solitude was not in 
him, as it is in some men, an affectation of inde- 
pendence : it was in the original make of the man. 
He was by nature a solitaire in his thinking. Noth- 
ing struck him as it did the average of men. He 
was not one of the average. He took in all things, 
and reflected back all things, at angles of his own. 
He never could have been a partisan. With many 
of the tastes of leadership, he could never have led 
a party, or founded a school : still less could he 
have been a follower of other leaders. It was not 
in him to herd with his kind. He recalled to one's 
thoughts Wordsworth's apostrophe to Milton : — 

" Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." 

At the time I mention, he was preparing for the 
press the last edition of his work on the " Atone- 
ment." Several times he spoke t)f it as the only 
thing for which he desired to live. He brought 
the unfinished sheets from his sick-room to the 
mountains, hoping to gain "force enough" to 
"round out" his views by his latest "insight." 
Other subjects of theological controversy he would 
have been glad to undertake, for on them all he 
believed that he had conceptions which no other 
man had ; but he would say of them, " There isn't 
force enough left in me to express myself upon 
them." 

It was obvious that his own ideal of his life's 
work was that of discovery. If he had nothing to 



A Vacation with Dr. Bushnell. 223 

say to the world which was fresh to his own mind, 
he had nothing worth his saying or the world's 
hearing. Some men spend the closing years of 
their lives in gathering up and labelling, and 
storing in the world's libraries, the fruit of labors 
long past, and which to themselves have become 
old. Dr. Bushnell seemed not to regard exhumed 
accumulations of literature as worth reviving. A 
thought once buried did not deserve resuscitation. 
That which he should say to his fellow-men should 
be as new to himself as to them. When he had 
exhausted his power of discovery, — his " insight," 
as he was fond of calling it, — he had lost some of 
the prime qualities of power in communication. 

There is some truth in this. The fresh mind is 
the magnetic mind. " The immortals are always 
young." The new truth is the fire and the ham- 
mer. The soul which is aflame with latest discov- 
ery is the light which the world waits for. To the 
world of the future all other powers knock for 
admission in vain, if they do not come making 
obeisance to this one. Even great thinkers have 
sometimes outlived their life's work. Their book 
has come too late for a docile reading. 

The mercurial thinker of Hartford held and 
acted upon some such theory. He was a looker 
on and up to the firmament of truth, and what- 
soever he saw there he proclaimed to the waiting 
multitudes below, or to the few who trusted his 
vision. When the vision ended, he was silent. Of 
errors in his published opinions he spoke as freely 



224 My Portfolio. 

as if they had never been his. " If I see men as 
trees walking, I do not know that it is my fault." 
Not till the superlative vision was vouchsafed to 
him was it his mission to tell that. The vital 
thing was the latest discovery. "The prophet 
that hath a dream let him tell a dream." He was 
emphatically a seer, not a reasoner. The last and 
least thing that concerned him was the consis- 
tency of his present with his past opinions, or of 
either with the revelation of to-morrow. 

He cherished a profound disrespect for over- 
grown libraries. He would have assented to the 
judgment of those who have thought that the burn- 
ing of the Alexandrian Library was probably no 
loss to the world, and that perhaps a large part of 
the libraries of the British Museum and of Paris 
could not be worth their storage. Psychologi- 
cally, his mind was such as the Grecian mythol- 
ogy represented in the sibyls, and such as a purer 
revelation might naturally elect as its prophet. 
If he had been a pupil of Socrates, he would have 
had absolute faith in the " Demon." In this pro- 
phetic and intuitive working of his mind, though 
in other respects no two men could be more 
unlike, he reminded me strongly of Professor 
Stuart. 

" What does Dr. Bushnell mean? " was the title 
of one of the earliest and best criticisms of his 
theology, by Dr. Goodrich of New Haven. The 
inquiry, in substance,. has been the first on the lips 
of his critics ever since. It was central in my very 



A Vacation with Dr. Bushnell. 225 

few theological talks with him. He was one of 
the men, like Hegel, whose misfortune and whose 
fault it is never to be understood to their liking. 

He honestly believed, that, in his divergence 
from the popular theology upon the philosophy of 
the atonement, he retained all that is essential to a 
saving faith. Not only this, but he believed that 
he retained more of the truth than his critics did. 
His divergence was no divergence, but only a deep- 
ening of the old faith. It was a delving into a 
vein of underlying gold. More even than this : 
he thought he was nearer to the fountain-head 
of the very doctrine which his critics were trying 
to conserve than they were themselves. In their 
imagined conflict with himself, he thought, that, to 
a large extent, they battled with men of straw of 
their own creating. What they meant by "vica- 
rious sacrifice " he meant, and a great deal more : 
so much more, that his meaning outgrew and wore 
out the ancient phrase. He could afford, there- 
fore, to speak very genially of his opponents. 
They were, in his view, unconscious co-workers 
with him, so far as they knew. The difference 
between them and him was only that he knew 
much more. His drill had penetrated a deeper 
vein of purer treasure. He had "entered into 
the springs of the sea." He had discovered " the 
way where light dwelleth." They preached Christ, 
but he more profoundly. " What then ? Not- 
withstanding, every way, Christ is preached, and 
I rejoice." Such was his apostolic mood. 



226 My Portfolio. 

He spoke of the first edition of " The Vicarious 
Sacrifice " as erroneous, in the sense of being but 
a partial vision, yet true enough so far as it went. 
Of the revision of it, on which he was then en- 
gaged, he spoke as likely to be regarded by his 
readers as a return towards the current evangeli- 
cal faith, so far, at least, as it should be understood 
by them. It was amusing to see the simplicity 
with which he distinguished between his real faith 
and that eidolon of it which words could convey to 
readers. Language was to him, at the best, but a 
wretched make-shift for the conveyance of thought. 
He probably would have agreed with those who 
conjecture that perhaps, in heaven, pure music 
will be a medium of expressing thought, superior 
to the most perfect of human dialects. 

On the whole, he made upon me the impression 
of a mind still in movement on the central theme of 
the Christian faith ; not doubtful, so far as he had 
discovered, yet not resting in ultimate convictions. 
More than once, his explanations and qualifications, 
and quaint uses of language, suggested to me the 
conjecture, that, if he could have years more of 
study and of disciplinary experience, he might 
come around, through paths and by-paths of his 
own, to faith in the very dogmas which he was 
then combating. It is not always the truth which 
an inquirer disbelieves, but the angles and refrac- 
tions through which minds differently constituted 
have come at the truth. Give him time, and do 
not badger him with hard names, and he will often 



A Vacation with Br. Bushnell. 227 

discover truth through lenses and prisms of his 
own making. 

At any rate, Dr. Bushnell claimed to be a be- 
liever, if an eccentric one, in the faith of the 
fathers. He held himself to be substantially at 
one with the great body of the Church in all that 
they really believed of the "faith in Christ." Yet 
whether he was so or not concerned him little. 
Truth lay between him and God, not between 
him and the Church. He was simply one of God's 
seers. He was commissioned to paint the vision 
precisely as he saw it in the mount. The recep- 
tion of it by other minds was their affair, not his. 
Such, as nearly as I could gather it from our few 
and fragmentary conversations, was his theory of 
the true work of a theologian, rather of his work 
as a theologian; for he was very gentle in his 
criticisms of the work of other men. He had his 
own telescope, and they had theirs : that the in- 
struments differed was no evidence that both might 
not be true : the field of vision was very broad. I 
am confident that he has gone from us with no 
such idea of his own dissent from the faith of his 
brethren as they have. 

And the sense of that dissent, I must confess, 
grew dim in my own mind when I came near to 
the inner spirit of the man. That was beautifully 
and profoundly Christlike, if that of uninspired 
man ever was. Be the forms of his belief what 
they may have been, he was eminently a man of 
God. Christ was a reality to him. Christ lived 



228 My Portfolio. 

in Mm to a degree realized only in the life of 
devout believers. I had heard him criticised as 
brusk in manner, even rude in his controversial 
dissents. Scarcely a shade of that kind was per- 
ceptible in him at that time. The gentleness of 
womanhood breathed in his few and cautious 
expressions of Christian feeling. Of the sure 
coming of death he spoke reservedly, but with 
unqualified trust. The charity of a large fraternal 
heart characterized his judgments of men. His 
whole bearing was that of one whom time and 
suffering had advanced far on towards the closing 
stages of earthly discipline. 

Now and then a glimpse appeared of rougher 
speech ; as when, objecting to the use of the Lord's 
Prayer in public worship, he condensed the whole 
argument against it by saying rather gruffly to an 
Episcopal friend, "I don't want to say prayers, I 
want to pray." But his general bearing was that 
of one whom life had chastened to the utmost, and 
who was then walking thoughtfully far down the 
valley of gentle shadows. We discussed some of 
his clerical critics, who have handled his opinions 
without lenity, and I do not recall from him a 
single caustic judgment of one of them. 

Differing from him essentially, as I supposed, in 
his theory of the atonement, I still could not but 
see, that, in its effects upon his personal character, 
that theory had been to him apparently just what 
the faith of other" believers in Christ is to them. 
It was indeed no theory : it was a faith and a life. 



A Vacation with Dr. Bushnell. 229 

Few men have I known to whom Christ as a Sav- 
iour seemed to be so profound a reality as to him. 
Christ had been obviously the center of his think- 
ing and believing for twoscore years. The results 
had come to him in answer to the inquiries of a 
struggling spirit. In no other answer could he 
find rest ; but in that he did rest with a trust as 
deep and calm as I have ever heard from the lips 
of a believer. 

His theory of the impotence of language was as 
vividly illustrated in his expression of personal 
faith in Christ as in that of any mystery of theol- 
ogy. Some of his published utterances to that 
effect take on a new significance to one whose 
imagination can reproduce the melting eye and the 
subdued pathos of love with which he repeated 
them in the stillness of the evening and among 
the shadows of the mountain. To the hope 
which I once expressed, that, in his revision of 
his volume, he would hold fast to the faith in a 
divine sacrifice for sin, he replied with inimitable 
emphasis, " I do hold it fast." 

What shall we say of such men in our theo- 
logical classifications? Where shall we locate 
them in the schools? It will never do to set them 
aside as heretics, and leave them there. In char- 
acter they are better than their infirm and eccen- 
tric beliefs are. Let us find a place for them near 
to our hearts, so far as they are near to Christ. 



XXV. 

PRAYER VIEWED IN THE LIGHT OP THE CHRIS- 
TIAN CONSCIOUSNESS. 

The Rev. Dr. Norman McLeod records in his 
journal this sentiment, " The poorest man who is 
great in prayer is, perhaps, a greater man in 
affecting the destinies of the world than the Em- 
peror of Russia." This to thoughtful Christians 
is a truth familiar on the verge of commonplace. 
But it falls on the ears of an incredulous world. 
Men ask what evidence we have to support such 
astounding pretensions. We draw, in part, upon 
the conscious experience of believers for an an- 
swer. 

1. The consciousness of praying men bears wit- 
ness that the evidence of the power of prayer is all 
that the case admits of The world laughed at a 
theologian, who, a few years ago, essayed to prove 
the doctrine of the Trinity by the formulae of 
trigonometry, and the freedom of the will by the 
oscillations of a pendulum. 

The principle here involved governs the evi- 
dence of the reality of prayer. It is not mathe- 
matically demonstrable. Triangles can not prove 

230 



Christian Experience in Prayer. 231 

it. The civil engineer can not estimate it. The 
strength of it can not be tested as you would test 
the strength of a suspension-bridge. The nature 
of the things concerned rules out all that kind of 
evidence. The Christian consciousness finds with- 
in itself spiritual facts witnessing to spiritual 
power. It trusts those facts. Why not? Why 
is not your soul's vision of truth as credible as 
the sight of your eyeball? Why must I accept 
the testimony of my optic nerve, with which I 
have often seen double, and reject my inner con- 
sciousness of things of which I can take cogni- 
zance in no other way ? Like witnesseth to like ; 
matter to matter ; spirit to spirit. This is the law 
both of reason and of faith. God is not in the 
wind, nor in the tempest, nor in the fire, but in 
the still small voice. 

2. The Christian consciousness confirms the fact, 
which all prayer assumes, of direct communion be- 
tween the human mind and the mind of Grod. Vary- 
ing in degree of vividness, this witness of spirit to 
spirit is, perhaps, the most uniform experience of 
real prayer. The believer is conscious of exercises 
which he can not attribute to any other cause than 
the real and personal agency of God. 

Thoughts are often suggested which the believer 
feels that he did. not originate. Preachers have 
told us of such mental illumination in prayer, by 
which obscure texts of Scripture have been lighted 
up, difficult plans of sermons have been opened to 
them with an affluence of material, and a sudden- 



232 My Portfolio. 

ness of development which impress them irresis- 
tibly with the conviction, "This is the work of 
God ; this is the teaching of the Holy Ghost ; this 
is the fulfillment of the promise, 4 It shall be given 
you what ye shall say.' ' The Rev. Dr. Finney 
more than once cast aside the elaborated sermon 
which he had brought to the pulpit, to make room 
for another, on a new text and a different theme, 
which seemed to be revealed to him in the preced- 
ing prayer. 

Emotions often fill the praying soul which we 
can not otherwise as rationally account for as by 
the simple fact that the Infinite One is present, 
drawing the suppliant to communion with himself. 
" The Lord is in this place," said the awestruck 
patriarch. That feeling in a believer's soul often 
has the vividness of vision. A voice proclaiming 
the fact from the heavens would not be more 
convincing. 

Revolutions of feeling often occur in prayer, of 
which the most probable explanation is, that they 
are the work of God. Hope takes the place of 
despondency. Love displaces fear. Rest follows 
self-conflict. Trust expels forebodings. Assur- 
ance of pardon lifts off suddenly the leaden weight 
of guilt. Remorse transformed to penitent faith 
is one of the most revolutionary changes of which 
the human spirit is susceptible. Poetry and ro- 
mance discover nothing else like it in the history 
of human passions. Yet this is one of the most 
common experiences of believing prayer. 



Christian Experience in Prayer. 233 

Conversion is often one of the facts of prayer. 
A sinner kneels, oppressed by guilt, in fear of hell, 
self-degraded beyond the reach of language to por- 
tray, crushed by the accumulated wrath of God, 
raging, it may be, with impotent resistance to 
Almighty Will. Then a change comes over the 
suffering and guilty spirit. Penitence rises; tears 
flow ; hope dawns ; trust springs ; love, joy, peace, 
well up from secret depths never before unsealed. 
Something has stilled the storm. Some power has 
said to the angry waters, " Peace," and there is a 
great calm. The man seems to himself to have 
been a helpless recipient in the change. The 
consciousness of God in it so overwhelms all 
consciousness of self, that the soul thinks of and 
feels none else than God. 

Power of speech is often marvelously quickened 
in prayer. Emotions which the soul has strug- 
gled with long and painfully find sudden outlet in 
language of which the praying one never con- 
ceived before. Some men can habitually speak in 
prayer as nowhere else. An unlettered Christian 
was once summoned into court in a trial in which 
he had much at stake. He was called upon to tell 
his own story. He was flustered, he stammered, 
he repeated and contradicted himself, and was in 
danger of losing his case for want of the power of 
utterance. He knew himself, and knew that there 
was one act in which he could talk. He begged 
of the judge liberty to pray. It was granted. 
He knelt down, and with flowing tears poured out 



234 My Portfolio. 

his case before the Lord in language clear, cohe- 
rent, fluent, and convincing to the jury. Be this 
story literally true or not, it illustrates a fact 
well known to believers in the reality of prayer. 
A man is known to me, who in common life 
is an incorrigible stammerer: he can not say a 
word without making it three. He is the butt of 
mimics. But in prayer his utterance is Cicero- 
nian. Few men can mimic him in that. One 
prayer offered by the late Professor Stuart more 
than forty years ago is still remembered, and 
fragments of it rehearsed, as a most thrilling 
approach to apostolic inspiration. 

"The Spirit helpeth our infirmities." How 
often does the promise come home to the strug- 
gling suppliant, as a fact revealed ! Apostles had 
no monopoly of it. Leaders in public worship to 
whom the service is a cross and a terror, do you 
know nothing of this unsealing of the dumb lips, 
this inspiration of the silent tongue ? Has it not 
sometimes been to you like a burst of sunlight 
on a wintry sea ? Has not the outbreak of tri- 
umphant song, in the hymn that followed, been 
your own irrepressible offering of thanksgiving? 
Youthful preachers know, or will know, what I 
mean. 

But can not these phenomena result from the 
unaided working of the human mind ? Oh, yes ! 
they can. Sometimes, perhaps, they do. We can 
afford large concessions. But the point to which 
the Christian consciousness bears witness is, that 



Christian Experience in Prayer. 235 

commonly they are more naturally explained by 
the hypothesis of the real presence and the direct 
agency of God. 

3. The Christian experience testifies also to the 
fact that prayer is adequate to the achievement of 
results in real life which are intrinsically marvel- 
ous and improbable. The effects which follow 
prayer seem often intrinsically impossible. They 
are not to be accounted for, except on the suppo- 
sition that prayer has set in motion occult forces 
of immeasurable reach. 

Christians very well understand that phenome- 
non of mystery to statesmen, — that war is singu- 
larly uncertain in its issues. Those most learned 
in military science are most cautious in predicting 
the effects of military causes. The issues of battles 
are often strange and inscrutable. The battle is 
not to the strong. The race is not to the swift. 
It is not the way of fate to favor the strongest 
battalions. So largely does this mystery compli- 
cate the conflicts of arms, that men make great 
account of what they call the fortunes of war. 
Gen. Von Moltke names as one of the four great 
essentials of a successful general "good luck." 
Such is the world's way of recognizing the fact, 
that there are unknown and undiscoverable pow- 
ers in the universe which often defeat the cam- 
paigns of great captains. Modern armies Buffer 
panics, of which the most natural explanation is 
the descent of invisible auxiliaries like those 
which scattered the army of Sennacherib in a 
night. 



236 My Portfolio. 

Such facts fall in with Christian experience in 
prayer. The Christian consciousness understands 
and confirms them. They are of a piece with the 
individual Christian life. That is full of things 
similar on a smaller scale, — things which prayer 
seems to have called down from that secret world 
of spiritual causes. We believe it because we 
can not help it. We know it to be just like God. 
The sick are often restored to health in opposition 
to the probable course of disease. The peril of 
shipwreck is often averted against the probable 
triumph of the storm. Professional successes are 
often given in excess of all reasonable hopes. 
Deliverance is often thrust in by an unseen Hand 
from sudden and unlooked-for calamities. Ways 
of usefulness are often opened, as if by invisible 
allies, beyond even a young man's sanguine 
expectations. These things happen in apparent 
answer to persistent and believing prayer. No 
other conceivable cause of them is adequate to 
explain them. Christians would not be sensible 
men if they should refuse to recognize this divine 
intervention in response to prayer, as one of the 
laws of real life. Their experience proceeds just 
as if the promise were a real one : " He shall give 
his angels charge over thee to keep thee." 

The speed of such responses to prayer is often 
a fact which it is impossible to ignore. They 
surprise us in the very act of prayer. Many a 
believer might write his own experience, almost 
in the very words of Daniel : " While I was yet 



Christian Experience in Prayer. 237 

speaking in prayer, the man Gabriel, being caused 
to fly swiftly, touched me." 

The point which, again, Christian experience 
would underscore, is, that the evidence of these 
things is all that the case admits of. It appeals 
to faith, as we should suppose it would do. The 
want of uniformity in such experiences is no 
greater, the failures of prayer are no more, 
than in the nature of the things and agencies 
involved we should anticipate. In number, in 
degree, in kind, the evidences are all that could 
be reasonably looked for, — no more, no less, no 
other. 

4. If my space would permit, the fact would 
demand more extended notice, that the Christian 
consciousness of prayer and its results leaves the 
impression on devout minds that prayer has com- 
mand of an immense reserve of yet undeveloped 
resources. Thus far it has but peered over the 
border of the undiscovered country. The Chris- 
tian Church has but looked at it from the summit 
of Pisgah. Prayer suggests the existence of in- 
numerable hosts of agencies of unknown power. 
Possibilities of achievement in the future seem 
limitless. Mountains leaping into the sea are 
none too strong an emblem of the realities of 
coming ages. This unseen, noiseless power seems 
not half developed, because not half used. Invis- 
ible battalions seem hovering in the air, waiting 
to do battle at its bidding. Occult agencies of 
Nature seem but its servitors. The chief thing 



238 



My Portfolio. 



which makes the moral regeneration of this world 
appear possible is the reality of this power with 
God, to which he has revealed no end in time, 
and no limit in the reach of its achievement. 



XXYI. 

INTEECESSOEY PEAYEE. 

Is it a living power in Christian experience ? 
The following fragment of religious history gives 
answer. 

A lady residing not a thousand miles from Rich- 
mond, Va., has been for many years an invalid. 
She is a woman of rare character, possessing more 
than the usual culture of educated minds, keen in 
her judgment, self-contained in her impulses, and 
very far from being, either by nature or training, 
a fanatic. 

Being debarred by the state of her health from 
some of the common forms of Christian service, 
she has adopted the habit of silent intercession as 
a means of usefulness. With a woman's faith in 
God as the hearer of prayer, she has been wont to 
pray for everybody who has come within her reach 
with any special claim to her interest. Friends, 
acquaintances, strangers, persons whom she meets 
for an hour only, and has no prospect of meeting 
again, she quietly presents before God in prayer 
for whatever they seem to her to need most ur- 
gently. A stranger with whom she converses for 

239 



240 My Portfolio. 

a half-hour at a social gathering, a guest whom 
she entertains for a day, a person whose counte- 
nance impresses her in the street, a traveler in the 
cars whose conversation attracts her, — in brief, 
anybody to whom, for any reason, her attention is 
drawn with special regard, — she remembers in 
special prayer. 

Probably, without having ever defined a theory 
about it to her own mind, she has the theory that 
whatever interests her as a child of God interests 
him as her Father. Prayer becomes, then, her 
natural method of expressing that interest to God 
daily, and often hourly. Communion with God 
expresses it as artlessly as conversation would to 
an earthly friend. Her daily life, therefore, is a 
line of telegraphic correspondence between this 
world and heaven, through her habit of devout 
intercession. Such is the simplicity of her faith 
in prayer as a specific power for specific effects, 
that she accepts it as a method, and perhaps the 
chief method, of her own usefulness. She trusts 
it implicitly : she uses it expectantly. Does God, 
then, disappoint her in the result? The follow- 
ing is believed to be one of many incidents in her 
experience which answers the question. 

A few years ago two strangers entered the car 
in which she was a traveler, and seated themselves 
so near her that she could not avoid overhearing 
their conversation. In the remarks of one of 
them she soon became intensely interested. She 
inferred from them that he was an impenitent 



Intercessory Prayer. 241 

man, and for some reason supremely unhappy. 
This was sufficient to enlist her prayerful desires 
in his behalf. He became at once the subject of 
her intercessory converse with God. When she 
left the cars, that face, so full of the suffering of a 
turbulent spirit, remained with her. For weeks 
afterward something moved her to pray for that 
stranger, that he might find peace in Christ. As 
time passed on, her special interest in him gave 
place to more recent objects of supplication, and 
she thought no more about him. She had dropped 
the tribute of her prayers into the troubled cur- 
rent of his life, and left both it and him with God. 

Some years afterward she visited, hundreds of 
miles distant from her home, a friend who invited 
her to go and hear a celebrated preacher who had 
been laboring there with success. She went. 
When the preacher rose in the pulpit, she instantly 
recognized the face of the stranger who had years 
before so deeply moved her sympathy in the cars, 
— a face now no longer clouded by the disquiet 
of an impenitent spirit, but radiant with the joy of 
one who knew the peace of Christ, and was striv- 
ing to impart it to other souls. 

At the time of their first meeting he was, in- 
deed, of all men one of the most miserable, — 
crushed by affliction, but not subdued in heart; 
quickened by the Spirit of God, yet resolute in 
sin ; with eyes opened to his lost state, but blind 
to the gift of a Saviour ; whirled in the great crisis 
of his moral destiny, which comes but once to any 



242 My Portfolio. 

man, yet without God, and having no hope ; both 
worlds shrouded by the very blackness of dark- 
ness. Few men have ever needed prayer more 
sorely than he did in that juncture. It was one 
of those emergencies of moral conflict in which it 
is like God to interpose with a singular rescue. 
The appearance of the stranger now in a Chris- 
tian pulpit tells the issue. His conversion had 
followed within the year, his proximity to his 
praying fellow-traveler in the cars. 

This narrative illustrates the way in which God 
often intertwines his own sovereign providence 
with human sympathies and believing prayers, in 
the network of instrumentalities for the conver- 
sion of a soul. The death of a friend breaks down 
the strong man in his career of worldly success. 
The inherited faith of his youth, representing who 
can say how many or how mighty prayers of a 
godly ancestry, is set on fire in his heart by the 
breath of God. Then follow months of impeni- 
tent remorse ; and, when the conflict is deepening 
into despair, there glides in among the spiritual 
forces a gentle stranger, praying in the morning, 
and at noonday, and at eventide, for she knows not 
whom. 

We can not say what precisely was the office as- 
signed to that stranger's intercession in the plan 
of God. We coolly pronounce the event a coin- 
cidence. Yes ; but is that all ? Unwritten reli- 
gious history is too full of such coincidences to 
allow us to leave it there. Must we not believe 



Intercessory Prayer. 243 

that woman's prayers to have been one link in the 
chain of spiritual causes ? Why not a link as ne- 
cessary as the bereavement to that soul's salvation? 
Were not both the working-out of one purpose ? 
He and she, unknown to each other, met for an 
hour just then and there, and parted. No word 
passed between them ! How insignificant the 
meeting. A hundred such occurred that same 
hour on that same train of cars. The rumbling 
of the wheels seems to have more meaning in it. 
But the momentary junction of those two lives 
inclosed God's hidden decree. They may never 
be known to each other in this world. But who 
shall say that it was not that woman's secret inter- 
cession which turned the tide of conflict for that 
soul's deliverance ? May it not have been her mis- 
sion to stretch forth over that scene of spiritual 
contest the scepter of a prince who had power 
with God, and to beckon invisible forces to the 
rescue ? 

May not thousands of unwritten Christian biog- 
raphies at the last disclose such divine " coinci- 
dences " ? Possibly such results may reveal the 
chief reason why many an invalid life is prolonged. 
Very useless, and worse than that to the sufferer's 
view, such a life often appears. Yet it may be 
privileged to do the work of angels. " Whj- art 
thou cast down, O my soul, and why art thou 
disquieted within me ? " What if the whole visible 
universe be closed to our slow feet and trembling 
hands, if the invisible is open to wings of prayer ? 



XXYIL 

HINTS AUXILIAKY TO PAITH IS PEAYEE. 

The very magnitude of some truths breaks 
down our faith in them as realities. " Too good 
to be true" is the proverbial expression of our 
incredulity. Prayer stands at the head of those 
powers which by their greatness cause faith to 
reel before them. We need all the helps to faith 
in it which truth will warrant. 

1. Among other things, we need to realize the 
fact that prayer is a spiritual force. It is not 
subject to the laws which govern the material ele- 
ments. Fire, water, wind, electricity, light, even 
the most impalpable of material forces, bear no 
comparison with it. It springs from the depths of 
the human spirit ; it deals mainly with things of 
the spirit ; it reaches to the Spirit of God. From 
its inception to its result, it belongs to the spirit- 
ual universe. It is subject, therefore, to none of 
the drawbacks and limitations which restrict mate- 
rial things. In its working there is nothing cor- 
responding to friction in mechanic force, or to the 
vis inertice in the movement of the planets. Even 
what we call the " laws of nature " are subordi- 

244 



Hints Auxiliary to Faith in Prayer. 245 

nate to the laws of prayer. " Say unto this moun- 
tain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into 
the sea, and it shall be done." We loose our- 
selves from heavy chains of unbelief, if we once 
grasp and hold the full meaning of the fact that 
prayer is a spiritual power. Among those subject 
to the human will, it stands at the head of imma- 
terial forces. 

2. Specially does it assist our faith in the chronic 
struggle with earth-bound senses, if we realize to 
ourselves the fact that prayer is independent of the 
limitations of space and time. 

Modern discovery and invention have given to 
the human mind new conceptions of the possibili- 
ties of material forces, through their approach to 
the annihilation of space and time. Steam, the 
telegraph, the telephone, the telescope, have cre- 
ated ideas of power which once the world would 
have called supernatural. Men have probably 
been hanged as witches for the discovery of the 
germs of modern science. But prayer is a force 
which surpasses all possibilities of science. 

In a tempest at Cape Horn, when a captain, 
with the aid of a speaking-trumpet, can not make 
his crew hear his orders at a distance of ten feet, 
prayer in a woman's whisper can be heard beyond 
the stars. Space is as if it were not. Nature takes 
countless ages to construct a vein of anthracite. 
But, while a praying man is yet speaking, his 
thought has gone up to the mind of God, has done 
its mysterious mission there, and has returned 



246 My Portfolio. 

again, and touched his lips with a live coal. Pray- 
erful thought annihilates time more masterfully 
than electricity. We gain something in the strug- 
gle of faith with sense, if in any most homely ways 
we can realize to ourselves the subjection of time 
and space to this invisible and noiseless agent of 
the unseen. Oceans have no place in its geog- 
raphy. Centuries have no record in its history. 

3. We find an auxiliary to faith in prayer, in 
the fact, that, under God's direction, it commands 
the resources of angelic agency to the help of man. 
" He shall give his angels charge over thee." 
" Are they not all ministering spirits ? " They come 
in response to prayer. No other power that we 
know of reaches the innumerable hosts of angelic 
ministers of God. Science yet wonders whether 
it can ever establish intelligible communication 
with the nearest of the fixed stars. But what is 
that in comparison with a power which enters 
heaven, and brings legions of superhuman forces 
to the aid and comfort of a praying woman ? In 
Daniel's vision, Gabriel " flies swiftly" at the bid- 
ding of God, in answer to one human voice. A 
hundred and eightj^-five thousand fighting men 
were once slaughtered in a night, by an angel of 
the Lord, for the deliverance of a Hebrew prince, 
in answer to one prayer. Twelve legions of angels 
were onae to be had for the asking by a suffering 
man. This command of prayer over superhuman 
allies is one of the commonplaces of its history in 
the biblical record of its achievements. Can we 



Hints Auxiliary to Faith in Prayer. 247 

enter into the spirit of this phenomenon without a 
deepened sense of the reality of our power with 
God? 

4. It helps us vastly to realize what prayer is, if 
we admit to our faith its supremacy over Satan. 
The Bible magnifies, more than we in our modern 
thought do, the reality of a great and fearful 
adversary of souls. He is a living and personal 
being. He is the prince of this world. Tempted 
souls are in mysterious bondage to him. The air 
is full of his spiritual minions and allies. Their 
name is "legion." Under conditions of conflict 
with these invisible foes, human probation goes on. 

Yet over against this league of satanic forces 
there stands at every man's will the superior strat- 
egy of prayer. This is the only human power 
which equals that of Satan. This is the only one 
which Satan fears. This shuts up the gates of 
hell. The conquest of Guido's archangel over the 
Dragon is repeated, the world over, in the voice- 
less utterances of praying men and women. At 
the bidding of a praying child this prince of the 
power of the air stands aghast, and turns, and 
flees away. 

The assembled cabinet of a Spanish monarch 
once fled in dismay from the council-chamber, 
crossing themselves devoutly, in terror at a piece 
of clock-work so ingenious and inexplicable in 
its mechanism, that they thought it must be 
the invention of the devil. When the proper- 
ties of phosphorus were first discovered, many 



248 My Portfolio. 

wise men believed it to be a product of hell. 
Superstition has not yet ceased to tremble at 
things which it attributes to satanic devices. 
But the real agencies of Satan are more fear- 
ful than such things as these would indicate. 
They are no superannuated fancies and exploded 
dreams. They are among the revealed realities 
of the spiritual universe. They take hold on 
souls, and open the gates of everlasting despair. 
And the only thing at the command of men which 
can always and everywhere hold successful conflict 
with them is the power of prayer. Nothing else 
gives to tempted men and women the mastery over 
demoniac foes. And this, in the mouth of a child, 
can do that. At the bidding of a praying soul 
Satan moves very quickly. He flees. Such is the 
usual story of his defeat in the Scriptures. The 
wings of the wind can not bear him swiftly enough 
from the presence of a praying believer. " I saw 
Satan fall from heaven." Does it not uplift our 
sense of the dignity of prayer as a power of con- 
quest, when we admit to our faith the fact of its 
overwhelming conquests of demoniac battalions ? 

5. We find an ally to our faith in the reality of 
prayer in the fact, that it is always seconded by the 
Lord Jesus Christ. No believer ever prays alone. 
In the solitude of African wilds, Dr. Livingstone 
had an infinite companion. In mid-ocean, no ship- 
wrecked sailor ever prays without a Friend at 
hand. We have an Advocate with the Father. 
The only-beloved Son of God gives his indorse- 



Hints Auxiliary to Faith in Prayer. 249 

ment to the petition of every friend who trusts 
him. He to whom all power is given in heaven 
and on earth re-enforces the appeal of his most 
lowly follower. He by whom all things have been 
created adds imperial authority to the words of 
every suppliant in his name. " In His Name " was 
the password of the Waldenses, by which they 
recognized each other when all the rest of the 
world were their enemies. It is the password at 
which the gates of heaven open to believing sup- 
pliants. Must it not invigorate our trust in prayer, 
as an outcome of almighty power, if we can but 
believe, that, when we pray, Christ prays? Our 
thoughts are his thoughts. Our desires are .his 
desires. Our words are his words. They go up 
to God clothed in the majesty of his decrees. Thus 
he ever lives to intercede: what can we ask for 
more? 



THE VISION OF CHRIST. 

Danneckek, the German sculptor, occupied 
eight years upon a marble statue of Christ. He 
had previously exercised his genius upon sub- 
jects taken from the Greek and Roman mythology, 
and had won a great reputation. The celebrated 
statue of Ariadne, in the garden of Herr Bethman 
at Frankfort, is his work. Critics of art have 
given him rank with Michael Angelo and Canova. 

When he had labored two years upon his statue 
of Christ, the work was apparently finished. He 
called into his studio a little girl, and, directing 
her attention to the statue, asked her, "Who is 
that?" She replied, " A great man." The artist 
turned away disheartened. His artistic eye had 
been deceived. He had failed, and his two years 
of labor were thrown away. But he began anew ; 
and, after another year or two had passed, he 
again invited the child into his studio, and re- 
peated the inquiry, " Who is that ? " This time 
he was not disappointed. After looking in silence 
for a while, her curiosity deepened into awe and 
thankfulness ; and, bursting into tears, she said in 

250 



The Vision of Christ. 251 

low and gentle tones, "Suffer little children to 
come unto me." It was enough. The untutored 
instinct of the child had divined his meaning, 
and he knew that his work was a success. 

He believed then, and ever afterward, that he 
had been inspired of God to do that thing. He 
thought that he had seen a vision of Christ in his 
solitary vigils. He had but transferred to the mar- 
ble the image which the Lord had shown to him. 
His rising fame attracted the attention of Napo- 
leon ; and he was requested to make a statue of 
Venus, similar to the Ariadne, for the gallery of 
the Louvre. He refused, saying, " A man who has 
seen Christ would commit sacrilege if he should 
employ his art in the carving of a Pagan goddess. 
My art is henceforth a consecrated thing." 

Is there not an experience of communion with 
God in Christ, not uncommon to mature believers, 
which is equivalent to a vision of the Lord, and 
which renders life and life's work, even its hum- 
blest occupations, sacred ? Italian and Spanish art 
contains many works in painting and sculpture 
on subjects derived from scriptural biography and 
history, to which their authors have given years 
of toil, and on which they labored in a state of 
religious fervor. Some of them believed that their 
artistic vision was illumined by the Holy Ghost. 
The privilege of every Christian life is not less 
exalted. The Scriptures seem to assure us of this. 
" Our fellowship is with the Father, and with his 
Son Jesus Christ." " Your life is hid with Christ 



252 My Portfolio. 

in God." "He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in 
God, and God in him." Such words, if they mean 
any thing, mean something unutterably great. It 
is no prerogative of an elect few. The lowliest 
not less than the loftiest life may have this ele- 
ment of an infinite dignity. A profoundly prayer- 
ful life is by that single feature of it lifted into 
sympathy with God. A mean thing can not be 
made noble by it, but a small thing can be made 
great. The work of a laundress or a bricklayer 
may attract the respect of angels. 

Hugh Miller, when working at his trade as a 
stone-mason, used to say that his was a grand call- 
ing, because the routine of it gave to a first-class 
workman so much time and mental force for silent 
communion with God. It was in such communion 
that he laid the foundation of that dignity of char- 
acter which afterward made him the companion 
of philosophers and the instructor of princes. It 
matters little what may be a man's employment 
in life. The whole life is ennobled and adorned 
by it if it is done as in a vision of Christ. " In 
His Name " was the watchword of the Walden- 
ses, and their form of salutation when they met 
and when they parted. It expressed their supreme 
idea of life, and of all that made it worth living. 
They said it at their weddings, and repeated it 
at their funerals. It was their formula in baptism 
and at the Lord's Supper, and it lifted to the same 
altitude of dignity their work in their fields and 
vineyards. When have wise men ever discovered 



The Vision of Christ. 253 

a theory of life more magnificent and inspiring ? 
No being in the universe has a more exalted occa- 
sion for self-respect than one who lives in a vision 
of Christ. The apostle could find no more hon- 
orable words in which to depict the life of Moses 
than to say of it, " He endured, as seeing Him 
who is invisible." 



XXIX. 

THE CBOSS IS THE DOOK. 

Pbobably it is not commonly known that we 
all have in our dwellings a relic of mediaeval piety 
which may stir the Puritan blood in the veins of 
some of us. Our ancestors, if their attention had 
been called to it, would, perhaps, have exorcised it 
from every Puritan home, with stern ceremony of 
prayer and practical reform, if not by the ordeal 
of fire. 

The upper half of the paneling of doors, till re- 
cently universal in our domestic architecture, rep- 
resents the form of a Roman cross. Remove the 
panels, and the cross is there complete and in exact 
proportions. Many have doubtless observed the 
fact, and perhaps with a momentary chastening of 
feeling at the thought suggested. Some, who have 
more than the average degree of susceptibility to 
the impressions of material symbols, have probably 
been quite willing to recognize the undesigned 
memento ; yet they might never have cared to 
originate it. Has it not sometimes prompted ejac- 
ulatory praj^er ? 

Such was, in fact, its original purpose. It was 

254 



The Cross in the Door. 255 

no fortuitous circumstance, or geometric conven- 
ience, in domestic building. It had its origin in 
the religious fervor of the crusades, which made 
every thing that could be thus employed an em- 
blem of the central truths and forms of Christian 
worship. The same religious tastes which con- 
structed the ancient cathedrals in the form of the 
cross, and scattered crosses and the instruments of 
our Lord's passion everywhere by the roadside, 
gave structure to windows and doors. Windows 
in mediaeval castles, and in the upper class of hum- 
bler homes as well, were divided by the Roman 
cross, the pillar running perpendicularly through 
the center, and the cross-beam near the top ; so 
that every eye that looked out upon the outside 
world should look through the type of the central 
thought of the Christian faith. Hence arose the 
French word croisee, used as the synonym of 
fenetre, " a window." With the same design, the 
paneling of doors was so constructed as to form 
the same device. 

From that day to this, this usage of household 
architecture has remained, — a silent witness to 
the devotion of another age. To mediaeval piety 
it must have been an impressive circumstance of 
daily life, that, every time one passed through a 
doorway, one faced the emblem of the great Chris- 
tian tragedy. Entering the room where the daily 
meals were served, or going to the chamber of 
repose at night, every inmate of the home looked 
upon the sign of the sacrifice on which the salva- 



256 My Portfolio. 

tion of all depended ; and the same token was one 
of the first images to greet the eye in the morning. 
The Christian home, however lowly, if it rose to 
the dignity of paneled doors and transom-win- 
dows, was thus crowded with reproductions of the 
symbol which the sensitive religious temperament 
of the age made sacred to all, and which often 
brought tears to the eyes of many. By such ex- 
pedients did our fathers strive to make the great 
thoughts of the Christian faith a pervasive pres- 
ence with themselves and their children. 

It is a singular fact, that this amiable relic of 
those bygone times — one hesitates to call them 
superstitious times — escaped entirely the icono- 
clasm of the reformers. While Genevan and 
Dutch and Scotch zealots, with hammer and broad- 
axe and firebrand, were annihilating the cathedral 
churches, stripping them of cross and crucifix and 
saintly image, and were even exorcising from the 
spires, as an invention of the Devil, the most 
comely and pertinent symbol of their and our 
theory of prayer, and, as if themselves outwitted 
by the Devil, were substituting in place of the 
cross those horrible satires on Protestant Chris- 
tianity, the weather-vane and the cockerel, in 
their own homes, scattered everywhere before their 
very eyes, was the abhorred object of their fury 
en every door and in every transom-window. It 
still existed two years ago in the door of John 
Knox's study in Edinburgh. The stern old man 
could not help seeing it every time he raised his 



The Cross i$i the Door. 257 

eyes from the book before him. If he could but 
have looked upon it oftener with suffused eyes, his 
preaching, which the English ambassador said 
"put into him more life than his six hundred 
trumpets," might have derived from it some other 
tones than those of trumpets, and tones which 
that preaching greatly needed. 

The crossbar of the window we have lost, except 
as the modern revival of mediaeval architecture has 
restored it ; but the beautiful symbol of our faith 
remains intact in the door, almost everywhere, as 
in the olden time. Who would have it otherwise ? 
Are we not all sufficiently open to religious impres- 
sions through the eye, and far enough removed 
from peril of superstition, to be pleasantly and 
usefully reminded by this relic of Him who said, 
" I am the Door : by me if any man enter in, he 
shall be saved " ? Our fathers of the middle age 
may not have been more holy than we are ; but 
were they not more natural in their pious love of 
memorials of the life and death of our Lord ? It 
surely can do us no harm to be, to the extent of 
silent notice of the cross in the door, unconscious 
ritualists. 

The authority for the assertion as to the origin 
of the cross in the paneled door is J. Fenimore 
Cooper, the American novelist, whose well-known 
antiquarian tastes are presumed to be a sufficient 
guaranty of his accuracy in researches of this 
kind. 



XXX. 

THE PEEMATURE CLOSING- OP A LIFE'S WORK. 

"It is a great mystery. I have prayed for 
that golden setting of life's sun which attends an 
old man's usefulness when prolonged to the very 
grave. God denies my prayer. I am thrust aside 
at the age of forty-two. I seem to myself like a 
candle blown out by a puff of wind." Such was 
the lamentation, to a friend, of one who was arrest- 
ed in his life's work by incurable disease in middle 
life. He was one of many whose discipline takes 
this mysterious form. Are there any reasons for 
it which can light up the darkness of the trial ? 

1. We can see, that, in the lives of us all, phy- 
sical latvs are at work which predestine life's de- 
cline and end, and which can not, in God's wise 
planning of a man's destiny, be disregarded. 
" Every man's life is a plan of God." But as such 
it hangs upon other plans which have gone before 
it. It includes inherited tendencies, and drifts of 
disease which foredoom the body to its dissolution 
at its appointed time. We live in grand lines of 
inheritance. These run too far back, and involve 
the action of too many progenitors, known and 

258 



The Premature Closing of a Life's Work. 259 

unknown, for us now to trace them to their origin, 
and see their ultimate causes and reasons. The 
breaking-up of a man's physical constitution may 
be the execution of a decree which started on its 
fatal way to the sufferer a thousand years ago. It 
might be the extreme of caprice in God to arrest 
that decree now. It is fixed in one of the great 
grooves of the universe, and can not be dislodged, 
perhaps, without giving a shock to the whole. It 
must run its course, and do its work, as gravita- 
tion does. Unknown reasons for it, involving a 
thousand other lines of destiny, may have been 
accumulating along its march from the begin- 
ning. That it had a beginning necessitates just 
the end it works out, and no other. 

The premature ending of a good man's life, or 
of his life's work, is, in this aspect of it, one of the 
mysteries of which all that we can say is, " It is 
law; it is law." The past having been what it 
was, the present must be what it is. Infinite wis- 
dom can plan no otherwise : as well seek to have 
the courses of the planets reversed by suspend- 
ing the law of gravitation, to save a child falling 
from the house-top. And there we must leave 
it. It plants itself deep, out of sight, in the un- 
changeableness of God. The infinite and eternal 
reason for it may be simply that God is God. A 
life may be cut short without a solitary reason for 
it which starts with the sufferer himself. The 
reasons may all lie back of him, in the night of 
ages which none but the eye of God can penetrate. 



260 My Portfolio. 

It is something to be able to see an inexplicable 
trial thus hiding itself in the infinity of God. 

2. It is noticeable also, that, in the experience of 
some of these early doomed men, their whole life 
has been marked by prematurity. The end is but 
the natural sequence of the beginning. They were 
precocious children. They learned the alphabet at 
a sitting. They could read the Bible when but 
four years old. Their memory goes back to the 
later half of their second year. One such read 
" Edwards on the Will " at twelve years of age. 
In college they led their seniors. They began 
their public life, as William Pitt did, in their 
minority. I have in mind one clergyman of this 
class who died at sixty, and his friends lamented 
his early end ; but he preached his first sermon 
while yet a minor, and old men who heard it were 
captivated by its eloquence. Forty solid years 
measured his ministry. The late Dr. Joseph P. 
Thompson was one of these early developed and 
early crowned ones. 

Now, it is in graceful keeping with such a career, 
that it should end prematurely, for it began so. 
The fruit which is early "set" ripens early, and 
falls while another is yet green. Such men may 
have done a long life's work at the age of sixty. 
Forty years are a long service. What matters it 
whether it ranges from the age of twenty to that 
of sixty, or from that of thirty to that of three- 
score and ten ? The real rounding of one's life, 
and the " finishing " of one's " course " in sym- 



The Premature Closing of a Life's Work. 261 

metrical proportion, like that in which St. Paul 
exulted, may require the premature ending as the 
only becoming sequel to the premature beginning 
and the precocious growth. Such a man is not 
wise in the ways of God if he says, " I am cut off 
in the midst of my days." 

3. I find in the lives of some good men hints of 
some special reason for withholding them from the 
execution of their plans of usefulness, correspond- 
ing to that which forbade to King David the build- 
ing of the temple. We may not know the reason ; 
but the look of things is so singularly like that of 
the experience of the Hebrew monarch, that we 
can not but believe that there is one. 

The reason assigned for that summary disap- 
pointment of his hopes does not necessarily imply, 
that in personal character he was unfit for the 
work he aspired to : on the contrary, in some 
respects he was pre-eminently qualified for it. 
Who more so? Human wisdom would have chosen 
him for it before any other prince in Hebrew an- 
nals. As a lyric poet he had composed the Psalms 
of all the ages of the church of the future. What 
more fitting, then, than that, as the chosen king 
of God's people, and the founder of the royal 
dynasty, he should have crowned his long and 
splendid reign by the erection of the temple in 
which that "service of song" should begin its 
magnificent history? That was a grand aspira- 
tion. It was an inspiration. It was worthy of a 
royal mind. But no: God saw otherwise. For 



262 My Portfolio. 

that tribute to a religion of peace and good will 
to men he preferred an eminent civilian to an 
eminent warrior. Military prestige is not in God's 
plans what it is in the plans of men. 

Yet it does not appear that King Solomon was a 
better man than his royal father. His wisdom 
amazed the Queen of Sheba ; yet the man whom 
God had called from the sheepfold to the throne 
was the " man after God's own heart." Perhaps 
all the reasons for preferring Solomon for that one 
service are not known. Enough is it, that, for 
reasons which satisfied God, he was preferred. It 
is something, yes, much, to see signs of God's 
sovereign election in such an unlooked-for, and, 
as we should say, eccentric allotment of the man 
to the work, and of the work to the man. 

Do we not sometimes see similar tokens of sov- 
ereignty in God's planning of the lives of other 
good men? They are peremptorily stopped in 
their career of usefulness. The work so dear to 
them, never dearer than now, is passed over to the 
hands of others. When every thing promises to 
them prolonged success, and the winding-up of 
their career by some achievement of signal value 
to the world, they come suddenly against a wall 
of adamant. They are shut in, can not take an- 
other step onward. They are taken from a career 
of splendid usefulness, and laid on a bed of lan- 
guishing, from which they never rise to be the 
men they were before. A pastor is taken from a 
loved and loving people, to whom, it should seem 



The Premature Closing of a Life's Work. 263 

that no other man could be so fit a leader, and is 
sent, as the Rev. Dr. Bushnell was, to the other end 
of the continent in the sad and oppressive search 
for health. No wonder that Dr. Bushnell preached 
on his return, upon " Spiritual Dislodgements and 
Dislocations " as one of God's methods of disci- 
pline. Such unlooked-for disappointments, which 
no human wisdom would have planned, often come 
violently. They seem like a buffet in the face. 
They resemble the dislocation of one's very bones. 
Yet how numerous are these sudden, and, as we 
should say, unwise, transfers of a life's work and 
its rewards to the hands of men other than those 
who have planned them, and who seem to have 
earned the right to them ! With one consent 
they all say, " We never were so well prepared for 
our work as now." These forbidden builders are 
a great multitude. Others rear with songs the 
superstructure of which they have laid the foun- 
dation with tears. Their work is underground, 
out of sight. Their more fortunate successors are 
the men whom the world knows and honors. 
They have gathered the gold and the cedar, and 
the ships of transport, and the cunning workmen ; 
but others have the glory of using these to the 
grand purpose, and, what is vastly more, the joy 
of the doing of it. Look around: you find the 
world full of these arrested, rebuffed, disappoint- 
ed though willing — oh, how willing ! — workers. 
Successful discoverers often are not those who 
have laid the trains, and planned the connections, 



264 My Portfolio. 

and done the work preparatory to the success. I 
read not long ago of an application to the State 
for charity to the old age of the discoverer of gold 
in California. The most successful preachers are 
large debtors to their predecessors. An evangelist 
whom worshiping converts throng is always a 
reaper of the fruit of the toil of one or more hard- 
worked, overworked, and, it may be, discouraged, 
pastors. The one is famous from ocean to ocean : 
the others — who are they? The world knows 
not, and does not care to know. 

This transmission of work and its reward is one 
of the mysteries which human wisdom can not 
pursue to its ultimate reasons. But it is some- 
thing to see that one is not solitary in the disci- 
pline. There is enough of the child left in us all 
to make us glad that we are not alone in the dark. 
It is more to see, that, in such a trial, one belongs 
to a goodly company. One joins hands with great 
and good men of whom the world is not worthy. 
Kings, prophets, psalmists, apostles, martyrs, all 
the illustrious classes of workers in God's esti- 
mate of the universe, have among them men who 
say, and perhaps not altogether sadly, " I have laid 
the foundation, and others have built thereon." 
Above all, it is superlatively cheering to be able 
to follow such a mystery till it loses itself in the 
fathomless depths of God's thought. If a thing 
is so strange that nothing short of infinite wisdom 
can explain it, there is joy in being the divinely 
chosen subject of it. 



The Premature Closing of a Life's Work. 265 

4. We find more tangible, if more limited, rea- 
son for the discipline in question, in that divine 
expediency which displaces old men for the sake 
of calling young men to the front. Say what we 
may of the usefulness of age, the value of ripest 
experience, and the reverence due to aged good 
men, this world's progress, after all, hangs upon 
the vigor, the hopefulness, the confidence, and the 
daring of young minds. Age is naturally con- 
servative. Conservative tastes grow rank with 
declining years. They easily become overgrown. 
When a man in public station begins to talk much 
of the past, and to delight his soul with the 
"pleasures of memory," it is time for him to look 
out for the place he fills. When a preacher begins 
to draw his illustrations of truth heavily from the 
experience of his boyhood and the moral govern- 
ment he found in his father's house, he may be 
sure that a younger man than he is treading hard 
on his heels to displace him. Men of gray hairs 
must make up their minds to this. It is well that 
it is so. Men can not walk fast enough or straight 
enough for the world's need, if they are walking 
backward. The danger of toppling over is immi- 
nent. The world needs, and must have, and 
for ever will have, at the front, men who live in 
the future, — men whose eyes are in their faces, 
who look onward, and press onward, and do it 
eagerly. From such men the world elects its 
leaders. It is always so, and it always will be so. 

The real usefulness of men seldom extends be- 



266 My Portfolio. 

yond forty years of active service. After that 
period, the tide of life ebbs: vitality runs low. 
Then a man begins to be called " venerable." 
The world reveres him for what he has been and 
done : it does not hang upon him as a necessity to 
its future. The aged good men are, with few 
exceptions, emeritus. In public office, or out of it, 
it makes little difference. Not a little evil often 
offsets, in part, the good they do. How opinionated 
we become as years multiply ! How wise we are 
above younger men ! How loftily we look down 
on the rising generation ! How sublimely we 
patronize our juniors ! Or, worse than that, how 
set we are against improvements which they origi- 
nate ! and therefore how hard it often is for them to 
get along with us ! They are tempted sometimes 
to ask whether our places are not worth more than 
we are. Is this humiliating to us? Yes ; but we 
had better see it as it is. The drift of old age is 
in this direction. We had better know this long 
before we come to the trial ; for then the chance 
is that we shall refuse to know it. " To this com- 
plexion we must come at last." It is easy to re- 
solve against it in early manhood, as President 
Edwards did, and as, perhaps, all thoughtful men 
do ; but how few adhere to the resolution when 
the strong current of life runs backward ! It runs 
with reduplicated swiftness as the decline of life 
approaches the last valley. 

This and other almost inevitable infirmities of 
age may be the reason why God sets aside old 



The Premature Closing of a Life's Work. 267 

men, and some men before they are old, and says 
to the younger men, " Come up hither." He often 
seems to do it ruthlessly. The world is in too bad 
a plight to afford to wait always for the slow ad- 
justment of men's minds to such displacements. 
Sharp turns, quick revolutions, sudden emergen- 
cies, occur in the divine plan, which require the 
quick summoning of new men to the leadership 
of God's hosts. This implies no sin, no unworthi- 
ness, but only infirmity, in the senior workers. 
The Army of the Potomac had many able com- 
manders. One after another was " relieved," with 
complimentary acknowledgment of his soldierly 
abilities. It was no reflection upon them that the 
one man who alone could make his way to Appo- 
mattox stood behind them, abiding his time. It 
was no disgrace to the old chieftain who " never 
lost a battle," when Gen. Scott retired to give 
place to a younger, not a better, soldier. Was it 
not time for him to give way when he fell asleep 
in his chair at a council of war, while the enemy 
was creeping upon the capital ? Yet the President 
and the Vice-President, and honorable senators of 
the Republic, and Supreme Court judges walked 
in humble procession to his headquarters to bear 
witness to the old man's glory ; and the nation 
said, as with one voice, " He deserves it." 

Yes, it is a wise arrangement that the genera- 
tions of mind on this earth do not live long 
abreast with each other. The period of their 
overlapping is brief. God wisely recalls the elder 



268 My Portfolio. 

to himself, and gives to an imperiled world the 
young life, because it needs that. Who are we that 
we should presume to withstand or to cavil at so 
benign an ordinance ? Let us rejoice rather that we 
do not have the ordering of such things. Let us bid 
God-speed to our successors, and say " All hail ! " 
to the coming generations. Let us uplift our own 
eye to that world where years are not counted. If 
youth here is so glad a thing, what must the im- 
mortal youth be ? What plans of service, what 
untiring labors, what swift achievements, what 
immeasurable successes, are awaiting us there ! 

5. The mystery we are considering, in common 
with all other dark things in God's administration 
of affairs, suggests further, as one of its possible 
reasons, the vast and complicated reticulation of 
human with angelic interests and activities. Much 
that is dark to us here may become luminous 
when seen in the light of the interests of other 
worlds. This is a great universe which God has 
to care for. We are compassed about with a great 
cloud of witnesses. There is enough in the life of 
one redeemed sinner to attract a convoy of angels 
in awe-struck study. May it not be for their sake, 
in some way, that one man is taken and another 
left ? Who can tell ? But who can tell that it is 
not so ? Any other than the order of things which 
God has chosen might jar upon the angelic sense 
of wisdom, and awaken questions which could not 
be answered, nor yet wisely left unanswered. Of 
this we can say but little, because we know but 



The Premature Closing of a Life's Work. 269 

little. Yet we can see that a vast region of 
unknown research opens in that direction. The 
discipline which buries us in oblivion or in the 
grave may excite adoring song beyond the stars. 
That " reason " which we long for when we ask 
the question " why?" may be found in the planet 
Jupiter. It may be among the " sweet influences 
of Pleiades. " At any rate, we must become wise 
enough to know that it is not so, before we can 
wisely discredit God's dealings with us by a sad 
countenance or a grieved spirit. Shall we pre- 
sume to contend with the grand public opinion of 
the universe respecting the wisdom of the divine 
allotments of our destiny ? 

6. Perhaps a more satisfying reason for the 
premature withdrawal of good men from active 
service may be sometimes found in the fact that 
some men need, for their best preparation for 
the heavenly life, a period of earthly repose before 
entering upon that life. Activity needs to be sus- 
pended for a while. The soul needs time and self- 
collection to look before and after. We all need 
a chance to gather up broken and frayed threads 
of character, and to interweave them deftly into 
their neglected places. Some need this more than 
others ; but do not all feel an instinctive desire for 
it? Have not many sins and infirmities of temper- 
ament been crowded out of view by the cares of 
service ? In my boyhood, it astounded me to hear 
one of the most illustrious of American preachers 
say to his people that he had been compelled to 



270 My Portfolio. 

neglect the spiritual nutrition of his own soul in 
the intellectual struggle to provide food for theirs. 
I understand it now. 

Why is it that some good men must go down 
life's last decade with the tottering limbs of a 
second infancy ? Sad, unspeakably sad, is that com- 
ment which we sometimes have to make upon 
one whom the world has honored with its trust in 
high places : " He has been a learned man, a wise 
man, a great man ; but now " — So strange a 
humiliation of a great mind and an heir of God 
must have something to do with its preparation 
for an immortal youth. " Except ye become as 
little children." Some may not be able to become 
that, except through the vale of second childhood. 
That earthly silence may be the great opportunity 
preparative to fitness for a service in the coming 
life, compared with which the grandest service of 
this life is but infantile. The sleep of the chrysa- 
lis is the forerunner of golden glory. If one can 
but believe that God's plan is made up of such 
inspiring mysteries ! Yet why not ? " Eye hath 
not seen, nor ear heard." Sin and its conse- 
quences have no concern with that. They are 
buried beneath the glory that is to be revealed. 
Why should we not believe that God's reasons for 
things are like him? "It must be his doing," as 
Charles Kingsley said, "because it is so strange 
and so painful." None but an infinite mind could 
plan some things as they are in the lives of us 
all, and yet make them come out right in the end. 



XXXI. 

WHAT DO WE KNOW OF THE HEAVENLY LIFE? 

There are thousands of Christian men and 
women whose life lies along the border-line be- 
tween two worlds. By the decline of old age, 
or by prolonged and incurable disease, they are 
brought very near to eternity, and kept there. 
They are irresistibly impelled to look over the 
line inquiringly. " Does heaven begin at once ? " 
was the query of a Christian captain in the late 
war, as he lay on the field, with life oozing slowly 
away. " I shall soon know all about it," he 
added, and then fell asleep. 

Such inquiries by those whom God brings thus 
up close to the river's brink, and holds there for 
months or years, are not unreasonable. Faith is 
not in fault, if we try to answer them. Some 
things about the redeemed life we do know. Not 
with the knowledge of demonstration : very little 
of our knowledge of any thing is that. But by 
either the testimony of revelation, or by the proof 
of strong natural probability, such as, for the 
most part, we have to act upon in the practical 
affairs of this life, we can say, of some things in 
the future life of the redeemed, "we know." 



272 My Portfolio. 

1. That life will be emancipation from a dying, 
and, in its best state, a restrictive body. This is 
certain. Whatever else takes place at death, we 
shall surely leave this covered skeleton. We shall 
no longer look out upon God's universe through 
dying eyes, nor get the major part of our knowl- 
edge of it through the discipline of pain. One of 
Quarles's " Emblems of Life " is a child peering 
sadly out between the ribs of a skeleton bare and 
dead. That emblem we shall smile at as belong- 
ing to a past world. To thousands of sufferers 
this will be a glad escape. Think what it must 
be to the blind, the deaf, the crippled, — to Laura 
Bridgman! "Let me pass out" were the signifi- 
cant dying words of one believer, which I find 
upon her tombstone. 

The restrictions of sense will cease. We shall 
exchange pain for ease, weariness for strength, 
confinement for freedom. To those who have 
long since forgotten what the sensations of health 
are, this is a glad assurance. Said one of the 
saints, who for years had not known a painless 
hour, when asked what was his most vivid con- 
ception of heaven, " Freedom from palpitation of 
the heart." His whole being had been so long 
absorbed in conflict with that form of suffering, 
that to be rid of it was often all the heaven he 
had strength to think of. Who of us, if at peace 
with God, does not sometimes exult in this 
thought: "One thing I know: whatever else is 
before me, I am going out of this worn-out body, 
to be shut up in it no more for ever " ? 



What do we know of the Heavenly Life ? 278 

2. As a consequence of freedom from the body, 
we may reasonably be assured of an enlarged 
range and an augumented intensity of mental powers. 
A deeper insight into truth, riddance from pain- 
ful doubts, the settlement of life-long inquiries, 
more profound sensibilities to truth, a more per- 
fectly balanced being through and through, and 
crowned by a more imperial will, — these things, 
it should seem, must, in the experience of the 
redeemed, be the fruit of simply going out of this 
prison-house in which we see darkly. "More 
light ! " was the dying exclamation of an illus- 
trious philosopher. With profound joy and a 
deeper meaning may a dying believer feel assured 
of its coming. I have inquired of a distinguished 
expert in natural science whether his studies had 
given him any new hints, from the analogy of 
Nature, respecting the intermediate state of souls. 
" Only this," he replies, " that Nature, by her 
organic changes in vegetable and animal being, 
hints at improvement, not decline. As a rule, 
organic change is for the better. Nature does not 
deteriorate, and is not stationary in quality, in 
her great transitions. Why should not the same 
law of improvement govern the transition of the 
soul to the coming life ? 

I conceive that the exhilaration of perfect 
health, which some feel on the mountains or at 
the seashore, is probably some faint emblem of the 
permanent state of the soul when either disem- 
bodied, or clothed in spiritual form. Youth, in 






274 My Portfolio. 

its most irrepressible and bounding overflow of 
energies, is a more truthful emblem still. " The 
immortals," said the old Greeks, "are always 
young." With a surer faith may we believe this 
of the condition of a redeemed spirit in the life 
to come. We have no reason to mourn over de- 
parted youth. That form of the world's elegiac 
poetry is destined to become obsolete. Our real 
youth is beyond the stars. 

3. The evidence is not small, that, in a life free 
from the limitations of sense, ike souVs natural 
dominion over material things will be grandly devel- 
oped. Mind will probably be independent of the 
veto of matter. Our Lord seems to have possessed 
the power of passing through material obstruc- 
tions without a rent or a break. Through closed 
doors and dense walls he passed with the ease of 
thought. Through angry crowds, whoso every 
eye was fixed upon him, he slipped away invisibly. 
Was this miracle ? Even so, it may have been only 
an anticipation of the natural sovereignty of soul 
over matter. Angelic intelligences seem to have 
the same supremacy over material forms, assuming 
them and dropping them at will. All the biblical 
hints of the life natural to spiritual being look to 
this as one of its conditions. They suggest the 
queiy, whether mind, after all, is not the only sub- 
stance, and matter the shadow. This is at least less 
improbable than the glum faith of materialism. 

Trifling as this is as a matter of speculation 
only, it is fraught with magnificent probabilities 



What do we knoiv of the Heavenly Life ? 275 

in respect to the range of activity, and the useful- 
ness and the joy of redeemed spirits. The pre- 
rogatives of spiritual being seem to be those of 
royalty over the material universe. Movement 
with the spring and the speed of thought is among 
its possibilities. The most distant of the fixed 
stars may not be beyond the limit of its travels. 
Man's dominion over this earth in toil and sweat 
and blood is but a faint symbol of his easy and 
luxurious empire- beyond its confines. 

4. The probability amounts well-nigh to cer- 
tainty, that the immortal life involves an intensified 
consciousness of personal identity. And if of our 
own identity, then of that of departed friends as 
well. The experience of drowning men in the 
quickening of memory is to the point here. The 
very objects of probationary discipline should 
seem to require this deepening of the sense of 
individuality at the end. The doctrine of a day 
of judicial reckoning, and of the revelation of 
things hidden, looks to the same augmentation in 
the soul's consciousness of being. Every biblical 
hint of individuals living in the spiritual state is 
of their exalted, not degraded, existence. God 
is not the God of the dead, but of the living. So 
far from truth is the foreboding of unconscious 
sleep, or of ages of dream-life, or of absorption in 
universal Being, that the scriptural glimpses of 
that life hint at just the opposite, — an intensified 
individuality. Revelation knows something of 
Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Elijah, of Moses, 



276 My Portfolio. 

but not a whisper of "the Oversoul," "the Soul 
of the Universe," "the Spirit of the Whole," and 
"the Ocean of Being," — whatever these may 
mean. These did not put in an appearance on the 
Mount of Transfiguration. Dives and Lazarus 
made no such discoveries. We shall, in that life, 
be more distinctly conscious of what we are, not 
less so. Memory will be more truthfully historic. 
Conscience will be more intensely self-revealing. 
Friends must be outlined to our vision more 
vividly, and therefore more lovingly. Stereo- 
scopic sight is but a faint emblem of the vision 
which souls will there have of each other and of 
themselves. 

Never was a more causeless doubt suggested 
to plague afflicted ones than that concerning the 
non-recognition of friends in heaven. Few are 
pestered with it who drink deep of the spirit of 
the Bible. If the question had been asked of our 
Lord by the loved disciple, — no, he would never 
have asked it ; by Thomas, rather, — I fancy that 
the Master would have answered, " If it were not 
so, I would have told you." It is one of those 
truths of which the spirit of his silence is, " That 
is a thing of course : waste no thought upon a 
doubt of it. It belongs to the alphabet of the 
immortal life. So sure is it, so deep laid in the 
nature of souls, that I have not thought it needful 
to affirm it. You will one day smile at the igno- 
rance which could question it." 

5. As the fruit of such changed conditions of 



What do we know of the Heavenly* Life ? 211 

being, we must look for a new sense of the person- 
ility, the perfections, and the friendship, of God, 
through new affinities with his character. This 
must follow the change from faith to sight. It is 
the legitimate sequence of growth from partial to 
perfect sinlessness. The pure in heart shall see 
God. " The glory of God " is no glittering gen- 
erality. "I saw no temple there." We shall need 
none. The struggling conceptions we form of 
God here will give place to a resplendent and 
beatific vision. " I knew a man . . . caught up 
into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which 
it is not lawful for a man to utter." " We shall 
see as we are seen." 

Our possible joy in God seems often very meager 
here : there it must be augmented in proportion 
to our moral sympathy with God. Physical and 
intellectual hinderances to it will be done away. 
Liberty from the intermeddling of Satan will in- 
tensify it. We shall delight in God in proportion 
to our love of his being and the response of sym- 
pathy to his character. God in Christ is a new 
disclosure of God in the history of the universe. 
Just how the divine indwelling in human form 
achieves its end, we may not know; but that it 
will act as a magnifying lens to the soul's eye 
can not be doubtful. It will realize to our con- 
sciousness the fact of sinlessness. It will, there- 
fore, calm our perturbations. The turbid sea of a 
memory lashed by guilt will be at peace. It will 
soften dread into love. It will give courage to 



278 My Portfolio. 

awe-struck reverence. It will still an affrighted 
conscience. All the retributive elements of the 
soul will return to their original province, — that 
of making sympathy with God possible, in waves 
and billows of ecstatic emotion, of which we have 
now no conception. Probably in no other way 
than by this humanized discovery of God in Christ 
could souls with a history of sin behind see God, 
and live. 

6. The occupations of that life. What are they ? 
If, in respect to the marriage relation, we shall be 
" as the angels," why not like them in their busy 
and tireless activities of benevolence ? Are they 
not all ministering spirits ? What else can ex- 
panded faculties, and deepened sensibilities, and 
immortal youth, and conscious sinlessness, find to 
do in a universe swayed by the mighty pulsations 
of the love of God ? Sabbatic worship as pictured 
in St. John's Apocalypse must surely be symbolic. 
The heavenly choir must be an emblem, rather 
than a literal picture. Life in heaven can be no 
statuesque existence. Emblem of what? Of the 
gladness, of the spontaneity, of the purity, and of 
the dignity, of untiring and diversified service. 
We shall mount up on wings, as eagles. In 
proportion to our capacities of service, and our 
sympathy with the great heart-throb of a loving 
universe, we shall be employed as ministers of 
God. Some of us will be swift messengers. Kings 
and priests we shall be. We shall reign with 
Christ. What this means we know not, except 



What do we knoio of the Heavenly Life? 279 

that it must mean exalted and pure and benevo- 
lent service in more than apostolic missions. 

Such are a few only of the facts of the life to 
come, of which we have the same kind and degree 
of evidence that we have of many things in this 
life on which we act with practical assurance. 
Do such hints make heaven seem inviting to us ? 
Is it home-like ? Does it seem " better to depart" ? 
The answer may in some cases be a fair test of 
readiness to depart. 

Many of us can not reasonably anticipate any 
neiv disclosures of heaven when death is at hand. 
Those who expect visions in the closing hour will 
probably be disappointed. The great majority of 
dying believers, and some of the best of them, have 
none. It is not natural to their mental make. 
They die with an apparent stolidity which gives 
to some physicians food for skepticism as to the 
soul's immortality. The mental constitution of 
most men predisposes them to faith, not to the 
electric imagination which forestalls the discover- 
ies of spiritual sight. The major number of us are 
naturally believers, not poets. Many of us never 
sing. The Rev. Dr. Candlish of Edinburgh said 
on his death-bed, " I have no overpowering emo- 
tions, but I have a great faith." Such an experi- 
ence only, have most of us any reason to look for 
when our time comes. 

I have in mind a dying woman, whose life had 
seemed to observers to be a foregleam of the purity 
of heaven. She had also a poetic temperament. 



280 My Portfolio. 

In prayer she often seemed inspired. Yet she 
died silently. She succumbed to disease as an in- 
fant does, as speechlessly and as trustfully. Most 
of us must be content with this. We shall not, 
probably, hear harps of angels, nor see shining 
forms flitting across streets of gold and over walls 
of sapphire. We are not likely to find on this side 
of the river loved hands stretched out in welcome. 
God will not, probably, work a miracle to improve 
upon the constitutional make which he gave us 
at our creation. Nor do we know that spiritual 
sight before the time could be an improvement. 
We have only to accept with contented faith the 
knowledge which reason and revelation give us 
of the unseen life, and ask ourselves, " Is it home- 
like to us ? Does our present character fit in well 
with its lofty and pure attractions ? " What we 
are in our gracious sympathies and affinities is 
more vital than what we know of things invisible. 



The Theory of Preaching, 

OR 

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

By Professor AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. 



One volume, 8vo, ----- $2.50 

This work, now offered to the public, is the growth of 
more than thirty years' practical experience in teaching. 
While primarily designed for professional readers, it will be 
found to contain much that will be of interest to thoughtful 
laymen. The writings of a master of style of broad and 
catholic mind are always fascinating ; in the present case the 
wealth of appropriate and pointed illustration renders this 
doubly the case, 

CRITICAL NOTICES. 

*' In the range of Protestant homiletical literature, we venture to affirm that Its equal 
cannot be found for a conscientious, scholarly, and exhaustive treatment of the theory 
and practice of preach ing. * * * To the treatment of his subject Dr. Phelps brings 
such qualifications as very few men now living possess. His is one of those delicate and 
sensitive natures which are instinctively critical, and yet full of what Matthew Arnold 
happily calls sweet reasonableness. * * * To this characteristic graciousness of 
nature Dr. Phelps adds a style which is preeminently adapted to his special work. It is 
nervous, epigrammatic, and racy." — The Examiner and Chronicle. 

"It is a wise, spirited, practical and devout treatise upon a topic of the utmost con- 
sequence to pastors and people alike, and to the salvation of mankind. It is elaborate 
but not redundant, rich in the fruits of experience, yet thoroughly timely and current, 
and it easily takes the very first rank among volumes of its class. — The Congrtga- 
tionalist. 

"The layman will find it delightful reading, and ministers of all denominations and 
of all degrees of experience will rejoice in it as a veritable mine of wisdom." — New York 
Ch ristia n A dvoca te. 

" The volume is to be commended to young men as a superb example of the art in 
which it aims to instruct them." — The Independent. 

"The reading of it is a mental tonic. The preacher cannot but feel often his heart 
burning within him under its influence. We could wish it might be in the hands of every 
theological student and of every pastor." — The Watchman. 

"Thirty-one years of experience as a professor of homiletics in a leading American 
Theological Seminary by a man of genius, learning and power, are condensed into this 
valuable volume. ,, — Christian Intelligencer. 

" Our professional readers will make a great mistake if they suppose this volume is 
simply a heavy, monotonous discussion, chiefly adapted to the class-room. It is a 
delightful volume for general reading. 1 " — Boston Ziofi's Herald. 



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Natural Science and Religion. 

By Prof. ASA GRAY, LL.D. 



One Volume, Crown 8vo., . . . . $1.00. 

These striking and earnest lectures, delivered by one of the leading 
men of science of the country before one of its chief schools of theology, are 
contributions of a most noteworthy sort to the literature of their subject. 
The position of their author is a guarantee that they are not devoted to 
any perfunctory attempt to reconcile opposing doctrines. They are a 
remarkably strong and independent presentation of what a distinguished 
scientific man, an acceptor of the theory of evolution and one of the most 
famous of its students, has to say upon those recent discoveries — par- 
ticularly in biology — which seem to affect religious belief. Both from its 
point of view and from its matter, the book fills an entirely new place in 
a most vitally important discussion. 



CRITICAL, NOTICE'S. 



11 There is more religion, more science, and more common sense in 
these discourses than may be found in any other recent discussion of this 
difficult subject." — Chicago Times. 

" The spirit of the lectures is thoroughly scientific, and also Christian; 
and we heartily wish that every skeptical scientist would carefully read 
and inwardly digest them. " — New York World. 

"No one can rise from the perusal of these lectures without feeling 
that he has gained a firmer footing than he had before. The style is deli- 
ciously clear and attractive, the kind which charms while it convinces." — 
San Francisco Eve. Bulletin. 

"The lectures are very pleasantly written in a simple and attractive 
style, though with careful accuracy of thought and statement, and it will be 
to the advantage, both of religion and of science, that they be widely read." 
— Philadelphia Ti?nes. 

" The best brief exposition we have seen of the relation between scientific 
and religious thought. We heartily commend it to all who wish to be stirred 
up to an intelligent consideration of this most important subject." — N. Y. 
lndepende?it. 

" Such an exposition as this of the real attitude and teaching of modern 
science, so clear an explanation of the actual belief of scientific investi- 
gators, and so fine a discrimination between the necessary inferences to be 
drawn from the accepted doctrines of modern science and the inferences 
actually drawn by particular philosophers, cannot fail to be an uncommonly 
acceptable work. Aside from all this the little book will serve an excellent 
purpose as the best and clearest explanation of what modern science is 
in its essence, and of what its conclusions are, that is anywhere to be found 
in brief compass by unscientific readers." — Evening Post. 



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price, by 

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THE POETICAL WORKS 

OF 

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. 

With a Portrait from a photograph by Sarony. 
Engraved by Kruell. 

1 vol., 8vo., pp. 512. Eichly printed and bound, full gilt, - $4.00. 

CRITICAL NOTICES. 

"Mr. Stoddard is a very graceful writer: his fancy is delicate, but never offends by 
puerility, and the reader cannot look through the volume without being struck by the 
wide range of his muse." — The Christian at Work. 

11 In an examination of this large and superb volume, one remarks the uncommon 
versatility of measure, which a careful reading proves united with uniformity of ease an 1 
harmony, the thought seeming to be poured out as musically in one form as another."— 
The Literary World. 

*• As we turn these clean pages, we read again some of the sweetest songs that have 
been written in our time, songs of gaiety or of sadness, but songs always natural and 
having in them the indefinable quality of genius. Whatever it is, the songs are gems cut 
with an art nearly faultless and sparkling with an inborn lustre."— Harttord Cournnt. 

" The quantity of poetical work Mr. Stoddard has done is no less remarkable than 
its fine quality. He is never careless, never writes unless he has something to say, never 
says it unless with genuine poetic taste and tenderness. His works amply deserve the 
beautiful setting they have been vouchsafed in this volume." — Boston Saturday 
Evening Gazette. 

"The original power, deep sentiment, tragic pathos, and admirable artistic execution 
of Mr. Stoddard's poems, give them the assurance of a long date in the higher literature 
of his country. He may claim recognition among the supreme poets of the land without 
challenge or doubt. His progress from the beginning has been as conspicuous as his 
genius is exquisite and rare. His fame reposes on true excellence in the poetic art, which 
is the most certain passport to perennial renown." — N. Y. Tribune. 

"All this is only saying, in another way, that Mr. Stoddard is a poet by nature and 
not by mere choice. His poems have been the spontaneous expressions of a deeply 
poetic nature. 1 hey have been written because the poet has had need of poetic utterance, 
because he has had something to say that was poetic in substance. The form of 
the utterance, metre, the imagery, and the words, have been chosen simply for their 
fitness to give adequate expression to the thought and mood of the poet, and without 
care upon his part, apparently, for any little prettines».-s of their own. It is thus that a 
strong man of rugged but tender nature writes poetry."— N. Y. Evening Post, 



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The Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by 

THE RELIGION OF 

ANCIENT EGYPT. 

By P. LE PAGE RENOUF. 

(The Hibbert Lectures for iSjg.J 



One volume, 12mo, ------- $1.50 

M. Le Page Renouf's great reputation as an Egyptologist led to his 
selection to deliver the second course of the already celebrated Hibbert 
series His lectures are the fit companions of Professor Muller's, both in 
learning and in interest. The glimpses laboriously gained by the aid of 
long undeciphered hieroglyphics into one of the most mystical and profound 
of all the ancient beliefs, have always had a special fascination ; and the 
time has now come when it is possible to join their results into a fairly 
complete picture. Done as this is by M. Renouf, with a certain French 
vividness and clearness, it has a very unusual, and, indeed, unique interest. 



CRITICAL NOTICES. 

11 The narrative is so well put together, the chain of reasoning and 
inference so obvious, and the illustration so apt, that the general reader 
can go through it with unabated interest." — Hartford Post. 

" No one can rise from reading this book, in which, by the way, the 
author is careful about drawing his conclusions, without having increased 
respect for the religion of ancient Egypt, and hardly less than admiration 
for its ethical system." — The Churchman. 

" These lectures are invaluable to students of Egyptology, and as the 
religion of ancient Egypt stands alone and unconnected with other religions, 
except those which have been modified by it, itself being apparently original 
and underived, they should be highly interesting to all students of religious 
history. . . . It is impossible in a brief notice to convey an adequate 
idea of Professor Renouf's admirable lectures." — N. Y. World. 

" The present work forms a remarkably intelligent and acutely critical 
contribution to the history of the origin and growth of religion, as illustrated 
by the religion of ancient Egypt. As a specialist, Professor Renouf is able 
to bring forth much information not ordinarily accessible to the general 
reader, and this he does in such a carefully digested form as to make the 
work entertaining and instructive in the highest degree." — Boston Courier. 



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price, by 

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Men and Books; 

OR, STUDIES IN HOMILETICS. 

Lectures Introductory to the "Theory of Preaching." 
By Professor AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. 



One Volume. Crown Svo. - - $r.OO 



Professor Phelps' second volume of lectures is more popular and gen- 
eral in its application than "The Theory of Preaching." It is devoted to 
a discussion of the sources of culture and power in the profession of the 
pulpit, its power to absorb and appropriate to its own uses the world of 
real life in the present, and the world of the past, as it lives in books. 

There is but little in the volume that is not just as valuable to all 
students looking forward to a learned profession as to theological students, 
and the charm of the style and the lofty tone of the book make it difficult 
to lay it down when it is once taken up. 



"It is a book obviously free from all paddinsr. It is a live book, animated as well 
as sound and instructive, in which conventionalities are brushed aside, and the author 
goes straight to the marrow of the subject. No minister can read it without being waked 
up to a higher conception of the possibilities of his calling." 

— Professor George P. Fisher. 

" It is one of the mist helpful books in the interests of self-culture that has ever been 
written. While specially intende \ for young clergymen, it is almost equally well adapted 
for students in all the liberal professions." — standard of the Cross. 

" We are sure that no minister or candidate for the ministry can read it withoutprofit. 
It is a tonic for one's mind to read a book so lud^n with thought and suggestion, and 
wriuen in a style so fresh, strong and bracing." — Boston Watchman. 

" Viewerl in this light, f< ^r their orderly and wise and rich suggestiveness. the=e lec- 
ture of .Professor Phelps are of simply incomparable merit. Every page is crowded with 
observations and suggestions of striking pertinence and force, and of that kind of wis. lorn 
which touches the roots of a matter. Should one begin to make quotations illustrative of 
this remark, there would be no end of them. While the bonk is meant specially for the 
preac er, so rich is it in saee remark, in acute discernment, in penetrating observation < f 
how m~n are most apt to be influenced, and what are the most telling qualities in the va- 
rious firms of literary expression it must become a favorite treatise with the be^t minds in 
all the other professions. The author is. in a very high sense of the term, an artist, as for 
a quarter of a century he has been one of the most skillful instructors of young men in 
that which is the noblest of all the arts." — Chicago Advance, 



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The 



Conflict of Christianity 

WITH HEATHENISM. 

By DR. GERHARD UHLHORN. 

TRANS LA TED B Y 
PROF. EGBERT C. SMYTH and REV. C. J. H. ROPES. 



One Volume, Crown 8vo, $2.50. 

This volume describes with extraordinary vividness and spirit the 
religious and moral condition of the Pagan world, the rise and spread 
of Christianity, its conflict with heathenism, and its final victory. There 
is no work that portrays the heroic age of the ancient church with equal 
spirit, elegance, and incisive power. The author has made thorough and 
independent study both of the early Christian literature and also of the 
contemporary records of classic heathenism. 



CRITICAL NOTICES. 

"It is easy to see why this volume is so highly esteemed. It is 

systematic, thorough, and concise. But its power is in the wide mental 
vision and well-balanced imagination of the author, which enable him to 
reconstruct the scenes of ancient history. An exceptional clearness and 
force mark his style." — Boston Advertiser. 

" One might read many books without obtaining more than a fraction 
of the profitable information here conveyed ; and he might search a long 
time before finding one which would so thoroughly fix his attention and 
command his interest." — Phil. S. S. Times. 

"Dr. Uhlhorn has described the great conflict with the power of a 
master. His style is strong and attractive, his descriptions vivid and 
graphic, his illustrations highly colored, and his presentation of the subject 
earnest and effective." — Providence Journal. 

" The work is marked for its broad humanitarian views, its learning-, 
and the wide discretion in selecting from the great field the points o* 
deepest interest." — Chicago Inter-Ocean. 

" This is one of those clear, strong, thorough-going books which are 
a scholar's delight." — Hartford Religious Herald. 



*#* For sale by all booksellers, or sent post-paid upon receipt of 
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Nos. 743 and 745 Broadway, New York. 



AUTHORIZED AMERICAN EDITION. 



OljFisHflii Institutions: 

ESSAYS ON ECCLESIASTICAL SUBJECTS. 
By A. P. STANLEY, D.D., 

Late Dean of Westminster. 

One vol., crown 8vo, Library Edition, $ ?.50 ; Students' Edition, 75c. 

The work includes chapters upon Baptism, the Eucharist, the Euchar- 
ist in the Early Church, Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Real Presence, the 
Body and Blood of Christ, Absolution, Ecclesiastical Vestments, Basilicas, 
the Pope, the Litany, and the Belief of the Early Christians. 



11 They have all an antiquarian, historical, and practical interest, and 
are treated in a very liberal and very attractive style. Dean Stanley is a 
genius as well as a scholar, and has a rare power of word-painting. His 
History of the Jewish Church and of the Eastern Church are as inter- 
esting and entertaining as a novel. tie always seizes on the most salient 
points, and gives them an artistic finish. He avoids all pedantry of learn- 
ing, and all tedious details." — Dr. Schaff in The Critic. 



DEAN STANLEY'S OTHE3 WORKS. 



THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH 

Church. With maps and plans. 

Vol. I FROM ABRAHAM TO 

Samuel. Crown Svo, $2.50. 

Vol. II FROM SAMUEL TO THE 

Captivity. Crown Svo, $2.50. 

Vol. III. FROM THE CAPTIVITY 
to the Christian Era. With maps. 
Crown 8vo, $2.50. 

THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH 

of Scotland. 8vo, $1.50. 



THE HISTORY OF THE EAST- 

ern Church. With an Introduction 
on the study of Ecclesiastical History. 
Crown Svo, $2.50. 

WESTMINSTER EDITION OF 
the History cf the Jewish Church. 
Handsomely prii.ted on superfine pnper, 
and tastefully bound. Three vols., Svo. 
(Sold in sets only.) $'9.00. 

THE LIFE AND CCRRESPCND- 
er.ee of Thomas Arnold, D.D., laic 
H< ad Master of Rugby School. 2 vols, 
in one. Crown 8vo, $2.50. 



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«JL GREAT SOUL'S GJRJSAT THOUGHTS." 

UNIFORM EDITION 

OF THE SELECT WORKS OF 

HORACE BUSHNELL, D.D. 



Each 1 vol, 12mo, per vol. $1.50. 



COMPLETE IN ELEVEN VOLUMES. 



Christian Nurture. 
Sermons for the New Life. 
Christ and his Salvation. 
Sermons on Living Subjects. 
Work and Play. 



Vicarious Sacrifice. Vol. I. 
Vicarious Sacrifice. Vol. II. 
Nature and the Supernatural. 
God in Christ. 
Building Eras. 



Moral Uses of Dark Things. 



"The gathered writings of one of the most original and thoughtful 
of the American divines of his generation, and one who has left as distinct 
an impression of himself upon the minds, at least, of the present generation 
of Congregational ministers as any other man of his day." — Ziorfs Herald. 

*' His writings have attracted considerable attention from the bold and 
original manner in which he has presented views of the doctrines of the 
Calvinistic faith. No well-furnished library will be without them." 

— Hartford Religious Herald. 

"There is a vivacity and grace about everything he has written which 
have secured him multitudes of readers even among those who do not, by 
any means, accept his views." — Presbyterian Banner. 

" This series occupies a place in theological literature that is filled by 
no other. Dr. Bushnell's highest qualities as a thinker and writer are 
nowhere better brought out." — The Advance. 



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